


(If I only could) Make a deal with God

by seraphim_grace



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Demons, Fae & Fairies, Gender Dysphoria, Historical sexual abuse, I Vampire AU, Kitsune, M/M, Magic, Magic-Users, Magical Peter Hale, Magical Realism, Magical Tattoos, Obsession, Other, Scenes of violence, Shapeshifting, Tattoos, Time Skips, Vampire Hunters, Vampire Sex, Vampires that eat people, kitsune-bi, offscreen sexual abuse, pay attention to the time stamps, prolepsis
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2018-08-27 12:51:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 36,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8402419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphim_grace/pseuds/seraphim_grace
Summary: But first, on earth as vampire sent,Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent,Then ghastly haunt thy native place,And suck the blood of all thy race.There from thy daughter, sister, wife,At midnight drain the stream of life,Yet loathe the banquet which perforceMust feed thy livid living corse.Thy victims ere they yet expireShall know the demon for their sire,As cursing thee, thou cursing them,Thy flowers are withered on the stemLord Byron---





	1. Breed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [keire_ke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/gifts).



> I changed the title of this - which I've NEVER done before because I was never happy with the title and it haunted me and then bam! it revealed the real name, the one it had been holding back. I hope we all prefer the new title
> 
> This is a fic with vampires who eat people, violence is a given,
> 
> This is a fic where characters die. I will not say who, I have pushed the major character death button so you know no one is safe. However vampires .... 
> 
> This fic features explicit sexual scenes and situations, some of which are meant to be deliberately disturbing but there will be nothing non-consensual shown explicitly.
> 
> As Stiles is both male and female in this fic (depending on his mood) I have used both male and female pronouns for him, if he is in his female form it is she, and if he is in his male form he.  
> This will make more sense if you just roll with it, but he will explain why he's unique in being able to change his sex and become the "queen of blood"
> 
> The vampires eat people.
> 
> Gerard Argent - he needs a warning of his own.
> 
> END NOTES CONTAIN SPOILERS!  
> 

Somebody says I love you  
All those years you never knew  
All the things that I could do  
I keep them in a hidden place  
So I can rub them in your face  
   _Snake River Conspiracy -_ **Breed**  
  
——-

  
  
Alana clutched her cell to her ear, talking to her roommate, as she walked along the alley between the two tall brick tenements. She knew better but the path cut a good fifteen minutes off her walk home and she convinced herself that the clanging she could hear from the dumpsters was just stray cats as Taylor chattered about her day at work. Taylor worked at a company that made the prototype clothes for department stores and her stories about the people she worked with were often laugh out loud funny. So Alana walked, with her head down, desperately ignoring the persistent and ongoing feeling of being watched.  
  
“Hey there, pretty girl," the man appeared as if out of nowhere, Alana had been sure that he had not been there and then he was. He had a dank look, with black curls that hung sweaty and limp against his collar with the night’s hot damp feeling. “Shouldn't a girl like you be at home at this time of night?” He was wearing a grimy old white tee and a jean jacket despite the late summer heat.  
  
Alana ducked her head to push past him, reassuring herself that Taylor would call the police if something happened. Taylor was there. She wasn't alone. She'd be fine.  
  
“Pretty girl," the man was crooning it out, “look at me.”  
  
Alana didn't know why she did, but she turned, and started screaming as the man's face split open, bloodlessly tearing the skin of his cheeks and showing row upon row of sharp pointed teeth, like a shark. As she spun on her heel she dropped her cell, not even noticing as it hit the ground with a clack and, from the speaker, Taylor asked if everything was okay, if she needed to call the police.  
  
It didn't matter that she ran because the man with the shark mouth caught her easily enough, grabbing her by the shoulders and pulling her back. The heel of her shoe snapped under her as she fell, despite herself, back into his arms and his monstrous mouth opened even further, like the back of his head was a hinge and revealing even more of those needle teeth.  
  
_I’m going to die_ , Alana thought even as she flailed and fought and kicked, but his grip was absolute, and then there was a terrible tearing sound and a spray of blood that soaked her, hot and wet and sticking her pretty summer dress to her skin. _It doesn't hurt_ , she thought, _I’m dying and it doesn't hurt_. 

Then the hands that gripped her like iron bands were gone, and without their support, she fell. Her pantyhose did little to protect her knees which stung with the impact.

  
“Go home," another voice said. It was a man's voice and when she turned to see her savior she recoiled back from and felt her stomach rise to her mouth. The man was handsome in an incandescent sort of way, with light colored eyes and a neatly trimmed black beard. His hair was black except for a stripe of white over his left eye. He was stripped to the waist, barefoot and splattered in more than just blood. His fingers ended in sharp points, not claws but actual points, and from them hung strips and gobbets of her attacker.  
  
The man who had attacked her was neatly torn in two from shoulder to waist like he was made of paper. “Go home," he repeated and bent to pick her cell, pressing it into her hand.  
  
“You saved me," she blurted the words out with almost no control of what came from her mouth.  
  
"I’m no less dangerous than he is," the man said firmly, “go,” And his face started to change, his skin grew cold and gray, his eyes blazed black and the flesh of his cheeks started to split. “Run.”  
  
Alana ran.  
  
—-  
  
“You always did like to make a show," the voice drifted down from above, from the fire escapes along the buildings.  
  
The man did not look up, “You always lay such obvious traps for me.”  
  
“You never let me have any fun," a figure began to descend slowly, as if lowered by wires, from the fire escape. It was a lithe young man with a shock of dark pink hair, cut neatly and shaved at the sides to reveal his shell ears. He was entirely naked except for a swathe of fabric that drifted around him as if on invisible strings, covering his nudity like a Venus in a renaissance painting. He was monstrous. however, with skin that was blue-gray like polished new marble and thick red lines marked across it like scars, and his fingers ended in sharp points from which his nails emerged, sharp as razors. 

When he was eye level his feet did not touch the ground.  
  
"I will always stop you, Stiles," the man said.  
  
The monstrous boy bristled at the name. “No one but you calls me that anymore," he corrected him, “I’m Lightborn now.”  
  
"Maybe to be everyone else, but to me, you will always be Stiles." He was implicit in what he said. "It doesn't matter how you look to them, I’ll always see you as you are.”  
  
“Wasn't that always the problem between us, Hale?”  
  
The man, Hale, snorted in disbelief. “You want the world to burn.” He said it calmly, almost serenely as he wiped the gore from his hands on his ruined jeans.  
  
“And you've never given me sufficient reason not to let them. We are better than them, love, they’re just cattle and we're predators. Look at that girl," he looked at the end of the alleyway where Alana had gone, “look at what she did, taking a shortcut down a dark alley at night, alone. It's like she wanted to be eaten.”  
  
“Just because a sheep shares a mountain with wolves and lacks the sense to run doesn't mean it wants to be eaten,” Hale answered. It had a sort of rote to it - like he had said it many times before and it would change nothing.  
  
“I don't want to argue with you tonight, love, let's go someplace else, anyplace else. There's a park near here, we can go there and talk- just talk, about anything else. We can pretend we're human, that we're lovers, that we’re normal.” As he spoke his appearance changed. The blue-grey of his skin took on the healthy golden glow of a young man that lived near the beach, and his eyes became that curious shade of brown that would sometimes look like gold. Although the colour of his lips changed from the terrible black to a soft, almost enticing rose colour, the shape remained constant, like a blob of paint that the thumb of an angel had smeared into the shape it was now.  
  
Hale still found him beautiful.  
  
“We can't be other than what we are," Hale said and it was sweetly said, perfumed with regret, almost as if pained him to admit it.  
  
“We can pretend," Stiles made that clear, “just for tonight. Just for tonight, we can be lovers, unrecognizable to the cattle, important only to each other, just as we once were.” He stepped forward and took Hale's hand within his own, rubbing the pad of his thumb over his palm. “It feels like centuries since we last met.”  
  
“Eight years," Hale clarified, “eight years, three months and six days," the words pushed past the heavy lump in his throat.  
  
"Please,” Stiles softened as he lifted Hale's hand to his chest, through the fabric of his slim fit tee. “Please.”  
  
—-  
  
There was not a park in the vicinity, as Stiles had said, but instead, a municipal graveyard that was clearly reserved for richer dead than the people who lived in the area surrounding it. When he saw the mausoleums and statuary surrounding the small pond like a miniature city Stiles whooped in delight. His feet left the ground as he spun, the grass waving in the wind he created as he spun. “Humanity's best art is spent on the dead.”  
  
He draped himself over one of the statues, _un pleurant ange_ , Hale thought to himself, and Stiles lay between the open wings so that his face was beside that of the angel, hidden in the billows of fabric. “They never see how beautiful their refusal to look at death is, I think I prefer funerary art to anything else, and things like this,” his hand cupped the angel's chin as if he could tilt it up for a kiss, “and they leave it to the weather and for the birds to shit on and the lichen. It's the most glorious contradiction. All this beauty so they can lie and say they cared and let them ignore the grave and it's inhabitant. I love graveyards, don't you?” He sprung up from the angel's back in a way that was not human, with an eldritch grace that spoke more of liquidity than musculature. He moved like a spray of blood and landed delicately as if he had been set down.  
  
"I can't say I spend much time in them, isn't it a terrible cliché for the so-called Vampire Queen to love mausoleums and crypts?” Hale sat down on the damp grass by the pond and watched the swans as they scudded across the surface of the water like clouds.  
  
"I am the Queen of Blood." The boy that Stiles had been was gone and in his place was an androgynous other with blue-grey skin covered in livid red marks - like the stripes of a tiger - small upturned breasts with sharp red nipples, a narrow, almost waspish, waist and thick hips and thighs. He became a vision of terrible fecundity - the so-called Queen of Blood.  
  
"I thought we were pretending," Hale said, and then the queen was gone and a skinny boy in a ragged slim fit tee took her place. He wore a pair of shorts that were at least a size too small, with the button open to reveal a soft stomach and pierced navel. He wore an old pair of tennis shoes, and Hale recognised that this was Stiles in his human form, how he looked without the glamour - a scared boy in clothes that didn't fit him.  
  
He could play the terrible goddess but Hale knew from experience that those kinds of transformation were hell on clothes and sometimes the illusion was enough. Or maybe the boy was the illusion. It didn't matter - it was Stiles to him either way, any way that he could get him. The monstrous virgin Queen of Blood, the great wolf, the terrible in between, the cloud of bats, or the scared boy underneath.  
  
“You don't have to play the monster for me, Stiles, I’ll always see you as you are," Hale told him as Stiles joined him on the grass, sitting cross-legged with his back against the base that the statue he had draped himself over was on.  
  
“Keep telling yourself, love,” Stiles said, "I am exactly what I am. I am an apex predator among sheep, but sometimes I get bored and miss you.”  
  
“Stiles," Hale began but Stiles cut him off sharply with a raised finger.  
  
"Lightborn," he corrected, "I haven't been Stiles in a very long time. Stiles might have had time for your lunacy regarding the cattle but Lightborn doesn’t.”  
  
“They’re not just cattle, Stiles,” Hale continued, “look at all this art you claim to love, is it the work of cattle?”  
  
“They breed like rabbits and live frantic little mayfly lives.” He spread his fingers over his thighs, “there are so many of them and so few of us that all we can do is thin the herd. At my worst, I could certainly not manage more than ten in a night. That’s barely four thousand in a year. It’s not even a drop in their ocean. We are predators, they are prey.”  
  
“And that’s Lightborn talking.”  
  
"I AM LIGHTBORN," Stiles snarled back, his voice stygian in the early evening, rocking the statues and startling the swans. “Stiles died, Derek, five hundred years ago when you made me this," he ran his fingers, sharp like knives, over his chest as his cheeks split to reveal the teeth underneath.  
  
“I once promised you a collar of swan feathers,” Hale changed the subject without looking at him, but instead the birds on the small ornamental pond. There were four of them aimlessly moving now they shook out their feathers from their slight scare. The streetlight overhead seemed to confuse them.  
  
“Are you going to kill one for me, the sanctimonious Derek Hale?”  
  
“You don't have to kill humans to thrive, Stiles," Hale stood up and thumbed open the button of his ruined jeans before he stepped out of them, standing naked on the grass.  
  
“But it's so much fun," Stiles said as Hale transformed. It had none of the elegance or grace of Stiles’. His face contorted, the nose growing broad and flat as his forehead pressed down and sloped back. It looked brutal and torturous as bones cracked and crunched, breaking as his back arched, his fingers curled under, and claws tearing free from the bottom knuckles with a noise not unlike someone snapping wet twigs over their knee. His knees, free of the jeans, turned backward with a loud crack and wet splat as the skin tore under the pressure of the swelling thighs, revealing black fur. His maw contorted, his cheeks splitting and teeth the length of his fingers tore through his gums in a rush of blood. With his paws complete he began to tear at his skin, loose and rubbery, over his chest and back throwing it away in thick wet lumps that landed with wet splats.  
  
When he was done a wolf stood in his place, huge and sticky wet, large enough for a giant to ride into battle on, shaking the last of the transformation slick from his fur.  
  
“And I’m the monster in this relationship," Stiles said in an exaggerated fashion.  
  
As a wolf Hale did not speak, but he conveyed his opinion well enough without words, before in a single lunge he reached the pond and had one of the swans between his teeth, tossing it up unto his back before coming back to Hale.  
  
The whole thing took less than five minutes.  
  
He dropped the swan into Stiles’ lap. 

“For me!" Stiles said, exaggerating his pleasure, “And you didn't even break the skin, how thoughtful.”  
  
As Hale tugged away the fur to reveal the man underneath Stiles opened his mouth as wide as he could, his cheeks splitting with a quick rasp, and bit into the swan. “You don't have to feed on humans, lots of things bleed.”  
  
“You want me to feed on rats and stray dogs?” Stiles asked, spitting a few down feathers from his mouth with wads of bloody spittle. "Like some crippled half pox of a vampire, not even those that lose their mind live on so little before the Van Helsings find them to put us out of their misery. You are a fool, Roderick Hale.”  
  
“Do you think they’d hunt us if we didn't hunt them?” Hale tugged up his jeans with an angry jerk.  
  
“Ask the wolves that, love," Stiles wiped the remaining blood from his face, sucking it from his fingers with a lewd pop for each digit. “They don't hunt us because we feed on them. They hunt us because we’re there.” He sucked on the pad of his thumb, his tongue curling around it in a way that was obscene. “They hunt us because we’re better than them, stronger, faster - because of all the glorious things that we can do like fly and change and feed. They don't care about the cattle any more than we do.” He corrected himself, “well, all of us except you, of course, love, you care about the meat.”  
  
“I can't understand why you don’t.”  
  
“But I do care," Stiles laughed, “vegetarians just don't taste as good, and vegans are unpleasant, bloodless things. They sometimes preach as you bite. You get a strung out gang-banger with opiates in his system, oh, how it flavors the blood, all of that chaos and desperation, yum," he smacked his lips together with a loud smack.  
  
“You enjoy being a predator,” Hale accused him as if there was no talking to him. “We are predators, we don’t need to be killers.”  
  
“I enjoy power," Stiles corrected him, “but I don't expect you to understand that. You've never been without it, you've never been powerless. It's so easy to be moral and upstanding when everyone does what you want just because you want it. Why not be a good person when it's only other people who lose for your sainthood?”  
  
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Hale sounded like he was lecturing, his tone calm and stentorian, “is that what happened to you, Stiles?”  
  
Stiles barked out a laugh. There was a stain of blood on the tip of his upturned nose. “Five hundred years,” he said, “or is it six now? And you don't get it, you've never got it. You appear like some fire and brimstone preacher to get me to repent and change my ways or the Van Helsings will get me like they wouldn't cut off your head just for being." He started to change back, the pinkish gold melting from his skin into the white-grey-blue with the livid marks that was his true vampire form, with curved spikes on his forearms. He had small high breasts, except now without a nipple, just polished skin, and his hips and thighs were slimmer, and a small penis was tucked between them, but there was no testicular sac. 

He was an idol of androgyne, something for everyone to desire but all the more grotesque for it - a figure of both concupiscence and asceticism - a perpetual Goddess of both venality and virginity - the Queen of Blood.  
  
With his pallor, it was easier to see the blood from the swan staining the alabaster column of his neck, like he was one of the _pleurant anges_ that surrounded them in the graveyard, defiled by vandals with stripes of red paint and the wings torn from him.  
  
Perhaps, Hale wondered, for what might have been the thousandth time, this was how the angels looked - how they really looked when stripped of the Victorian froth of lace and cleanliness. But Hale remembered the first time that he saw Stiles all those years before, with his dark hair and golden eyes, cheeks plump with youth and lips stained with rouge, not blood. There had been a corset bound around his chest to give him the illusion of breasts as he sat, wearing only the corset, stockings, and chemise, on Hale's knee, urging him to touch his soft thighs between the fabric, as his procurer watched. 

Hale had thought that he looked like an angel then too, in a time when angels were the soldiers of God - a thing to be feared as they knelt obeisance with one wing perpetually dipped in blood.  
  
The comparison was apter than he had known.  
  
He had created Stiles, turned that boy into this creature, but he couldn't kill him and save the world from him because he had been that boy, soft and ignorant with the face of an angel.  
  
But he hadn't been Stiles in nearly six hundred years.  
  
“You never look at me as something to be feared, or desired, only pitied," Stiles told him, “but I look at you and wonder how you look without the veneer of humanity you cling to, will you ever do that, Derek, will you show me what you truly are.”  
  
Hale silenced him with a kiss.  
  
Stiles responded with an open-handed slap, the ends of his fingers were dagger pointed and tearing into Hale's face leaving terrible, bloody rents in their wake. Hale caught his hand and licked the blood from Stiles’ fingers, not caring that they were diamond sharp, sucking at the skin, holding Stiles’ wrist and staring into his eyes with a challenge as he did it.  
  
Sex between them always started with violence.  
  
Stiles swung his leg over Hale’s until they were crotch to crotch, biting at each other as much as they kissed and licked, fingers digging into each other as if the other might escape or leave. It was not a coming together as much as an explosion. They lifted from the ground as they tussled and rolled and ground against each other, crashing into the mausoleum with the terrible creak of stone.  
  
"Not here," Stiles panted into his mouth. "I have a room.”  
  
—-  
  
Lightborn woke with the dawn. She enjoyed the warmth of the heavy arm draped across her, and the sour tainted puffs of air that moved the baby soft hairs at the back of her neck. Hale had burrowed into the dip of the centre of the bed, where they had broken the base underneath them, ignoring the broken glass from the bedside lamp that covered the mattress between the shreds of the sheet. She slipped out from under the arm, putting it down carefully as she appraised the room. There was a bloody smear the shape of her back on the ceiling, and a footprint too large to be hers in the plaster of the wall by the bathroom door. The bathroom door itself was bowed and splintered where they had collided with it in their passion like they were at war.  
  
Sex between them had always been like that. The more powerful they became, the more they destroyed as they fucked.  
  
Hale didn't stir. He had always slept like a dead thing after sex, and with Lightborn gone from the bed, sliding out from under his arm like she was boneless, he had rolled forward to lie face down with his hips tilted where his legs were still in the same position on his side. She tugged the blanket out from the bottom of the bed up over him and then placed a soft kiss on the side of his jaw.  
  
He didn't awaken.  
  
Sitting at her mirror naked she looked herself over, finger combing her dark pink hair. She opened her compact, although she could use illusion to have the same effect. She liked the ritual of cleansing, moisturizing and then applying color. It was something that she had always done, even when she was human. The kiss mark on her neck she left uncovered. When Hale bit her it always healed human slow, even the imprint of his blunt, human teeth.  
  
She smiled as she took the lip pencil from her case and scribbled a message for him before pulling on the slinky black dress that barely skimmed her thighs and a strappy pair of golden dancer shoes. She didn't like the points of stilettos, preferring the old fashioned narrow block heel. She stretched her arms up over her head and tousled her hot pink hair as she yawned, enjoying the tug of muscles as she did so.

She ached with the joys of a good hard fuck.  
  
When Hale snuffled in his sleep, she pressed a second, this time sticky with gloss, kiss on his jaw. “Sleep tight, beloved," she whispered into his scruff.  
  
Sex always had given her an appetite.  
  
Leaving the hotel she decided against the ass on the front desk who leered at her as she went past, then stumbled into the street like she was still a little drunk from the previous night’s revelry. It was an easy way to hunt, find someone who desired her, calling out to her, let them lure her into somewhere quiet and let them see her as she truly was and tear their throat out.  
  
She never fed on those who offered her kindnesses. It soured the taste of them in her mouth.  
  
“Hey, girly girl," the man said, “you sure you're safe to get home alone? A pretty one like you.”  
  
Lightborn smiled - it really was that easy.

 

  
  
Hale awoke alone in Stiles’ destroyed hotel room. It was never a coming together between them as much as a collision. Everything around them was destroyed except for the mirror where Stiles had scrawled a message for him.  
  
Hale couldn't help his chuckle. When Stiles tried to lure him in he would leave a distinct message all over the places he hunted, knowing it would call to him.  
  
It was that legend that he had written on the mirror inside a bright red heart, and signed with a lipsticky kiss.

  
  
Vae Victis


	2. Running up that hill

Is there so much hate for the ones we love?  
Tell me, we both matter, don't we?  
You, it's you and me  
  
**Placebo - _Running up that Hill_** [originally by Kate Bush]

  
**Two Years Later**

  
  
  
  
Szeraf Stilinski was feeling his age. It had crept up on him. It seemed only yesterday that he had been a fighter, as quick with his feet in the hexagon as with his fists. Then he married and joined the local sheriff’s department as a deputy to provide stability to his new wife. There had been a house and weekly groceries and a car that they could only just afford.  
  
Then Claudia was gone and his joints ached with every change of the weather, as he climbed into an empty bed she had never lain in but still felt her lack. His sheets no longer knew her perfume and the smells of her face cream and the cocoa butter she slathered over her arms so she smelled good enough to eat, but instead there were the spicy sweet smell of embrocation, and every morning as he shaved a face that was a little more grey, and wondered how she would see him now.  
  
Claudia’s death changed everything.  
  
Vampire attacks tended to do that.  
  
Sometimes he was back in the station when the man smiled, and his grin spread and spread until his face split open like a gaping chasm.  
  
Then the screaming started.  
  
Ten years later and it had never really stopped.  
  
Hale had appeared as if by magic, exploding out of his clothes as he became more and more inhuman and tore the vampire apart like the confetti on their wedding day.  
  
Szeraf had knelt there, holding the corpse of the woman who was his world and who know hung like a rag doll, her pretty yellow sundress ruined by the blood that was slopped across the floor. Her hair, once a cloud of chestnut curls, was a wet tangle stuck flat to the open wound in her head that shone in the emergency light. The thing had pulled the skin from her face as easily as a mask.  
  
Hale, covered with blood, it slicking down his bare chest and thighs, calmed himself and the split in his cheeks healed to reveal a handsome man under the beast. “You can't stay here,” Hale had told him.  
  
"I have nowhere else to go.”  
  
So he had gone with Hale.  
  
At the time he had not known why Hale had let him tag along as he hunted, but it soon became clear that Hale was lonely.  
  
For ten years Szeraf had joined him in his war against the Queen of Blood, a vampire so dangerous that Hale would not even let him near.  
  
Images showed her as a beautiful, otherworldly creature, like a statue brought to life by the blood that surrounded her like a swathe of fabric in a Botticelli painting. From what Szeraf knew it was deliberate.  
  
She called herself Lightborn.  
  
After ten years hunting alongside Hale, knowing what Hale was and the destruction he wrought upon his own kind, the vampires, he knew a terrible truth that Lightborn was as unique as Hale.  
  
Very few vampires lived for longer than twenty years past the bite. If Hale or the hunters - the Van Helsings - didn't find them, they’d end their unlife themselves.  
  
The hunger drove them mad, but a few survived it and transformed.  
  
Hale told him that he could count the ancient ones on the fingers of one hand and there at the heart of it was Lightborn.  
  
Most of the ancients were sedentary. They had been mistaken for gods and had been happy for humans to bring them sacrifices. Even now they lingered in quiet places, long since evolving past hunger. Lightborn fed because she enjoyed it - no because she reveled in it.  
  
She turned vampires wherever she appeared, causing chaos and slaughter under her banner and the vampires flocked under it, spitting out her legend as Hale ripped the heart out from them. “Vae Victis.”  
  
It was Latin. It meant No mercy to the conquered.  
  
—-  
  
As Szeraf got older Hale remained constant and unchanging. He was a handsome man who turned heads wherever he went, destroying vampires wherever he went.  
  
In Hale’s service Szeraf had seen the world, but mostly he had tagged along carrying the luggage. He had learned to use tech that baffled Hale, like hotel key cards and cell phones and the internet and grew old.  
  
He ached when he woke and ached when he went to bed. Hale had money and reassured him that money would never be an issue. If he needed something to just get it, whether it was for the hunt or for his health, but Szeraf got old and Hale remained the same.  
  
He did not want to be resentful, but then his back would twinge and he would see Hale - young and vital - with knees that didn't creak, or eyes that didn't burn staring at endless news feeds looking for missing people, looking for her mark amidst the mysterious dead.  
  
They shared a barely converted millhouse in Connecticut. It was ramshackle with the electrics pinned to the wall so the wires hung like streamers, and lamps were placed in random areas around the building, where they were moved about like candles where the light was needed elsewhere. There were usually empty boxes of take-out waiting to go into the trash, always collected because no one would deliver to the creepy old millhouse.  
  
They had a pump and a sink, there were plates and cups and cutlery, but there was no kitchen.  
  
Szeraf guessed a vampire didn't need one.  
  
The bathroom, such as it was, had an electric shower fitted to the wall which dribbled out hot water through what Szeraf guessed was thirty years of scale, and the implicit instruction if it was necessary to just get a hotel room and do what you needed to do, even if all you needed was a night alone, and not decent plumbing, even if that’s what it got used for most often.  
  
There was a microwave perched on top of a mini fridge that only held beer and filtered water, and both were stacked high with old paperbacks. The only luxury in the millhouse was a brand new coffee maker, the sort that took pods, and provided Hale with his designer coffees and Oreo hot chocolate. He was the sort of vampire that liked sweet things and considered key lime pie a suitable dinner.  
  
Szeraf felt old and useless, scrolling through conspiracy theories on Reddit, sipping earl gray left to go cold and wondering if it was worth it for the thousandth time to get that massaging shiatsu mat for his computer chair.  
  
He tried to keep fit. He ran a mile and walked for another two, but it got harder every day, even with all the things that Hale picked up for him to make it easier for him.  
  
In one of the wardrobes were dresses. There were other hints about the place of clothes that had belonged to whatever person had lived here before Szeraf, a pair of men’s shoes that were too small for either him or Hale, the women's dresses, thick framed glasses. Szeraf was just one of the people who had lived there.  
  
Hale was unchanging but people like Szeraf were interchangeable.  
  
He scrolled through pages of nonsense and adverts for things no one would buy before he saw it, a subreddit or community or group or whatever they were called labeled “Woe to the Fallen.”  
  
It was so obvious he wasn't even surprised he had missed it.  
  
The forum was mostly dedicated to the Queen of Blood herself, although some people were convinced she was a villain in a video game, but most seemed to understand what she was. There were threads with grainy pictures of her, from modern cell phone captures to old images dating back to the very dawn of photography. There were suggestions of attacks that she might have been responsible for; people photographed with her long after their families had given them up for dead.  
  
She never seemed to know that she had been photographed after those very early images, sepia brown daguerreotypes, where she had sat, like Countess Castiglione, enjoying the novelty of the art. She wore a _dalmatica_ that slid off to bare a lovely shoulder and a length of thigh, and she looked more boyish than usual.  
  
If Szeraf was horrified at the idea of a fansite, or shrine or whatever they were called, to one of the most vicious predators in existence he ignored it. He knew that the more dangerous a thing was the more likely it was beautiful.  
  
Hale was sat in a pool of sunlight reading. He found warm spots, and curled up like a cat, drinking designer coffees from a vacuum mug to keep it hot, and reading what he called airport trash.  
  
He liked archival mysteries where bizarrely over educated soldiers rushed all over the world hunting down a fictional McGuffin that could destroy the world in the wrong hands.  
  
The worse they were written the more that he enjoyed them.  
  
He wore a pair of black running trousers and a magenta colored sweatshirt with holes in the cuffs that he had pushed his thumbs through, and his feet were bare. He had pulled his legs up under him on an old velveteen wing backed chair.  
  
He always looked soft and comfortable, and in no way as dangerous as Szeraf knew him to be.  
  
There had been a year when he had been too busy to get his hair cut and gathered it up into either a sloppy knot on the top of his head or a pony tail at the back of his neck. Szeraf had damn near celebrated when it had been cut off by a lucky swipe of a vamp’s claws.  
  
He'd hated the damn thing.  
  
When Hale had found out how Szeraf felt he asked why didn’t you tell me? I would have made time and he was so earnest in his contrition over something so irrelevant that Szeraf felt like an ass for even caring.  
  
“Hale," he said, lifting the laptop to show him, "I think I've found something.”  
  
Lightborn had been quiet for nearly two years. There had been clusters of vampires here and there. There had been an encounter with the Van Helsings that ended up with the VH beating a hasty retreat but Lightborn herself had been uncharacteristically quiet.  
  
Szeraf had once been waist deep in a bottle of Maker’s Mark 46 and asked, which had come first, the VH or the novel. Hale had emptied Szeraf’s glass in a single swallow “For as long as there have been leeches there have been those that hunt them. They’ve called themselves that since the middle ages. They were the Hospitaller Order of Saint Michael based out of the small village of Helsing in the Black Forest. Over the centuries they had lost the trappings of the church and cut those ties, but they kept the name of the town long after it was gone, and they’d moved into the mountains. They built themselves a fortress, confident that the leeches would never overthrow them there.” He rarely used the slur the VH used for the vampires. “They forgot that if you lock everyone else out all you're doing is locking yourself in. They become more and more redundant with every year. Their information is hundreds of years out of date, they use poisons and spells that don't work but they don't change or learn. It’s only a matter of time before they realize that they are utterly obsolete.  
  
“And those that learn, the ones that abandon the VH and take the path, and roam killing the leeches where they find them, instead of dragging them back to their fortress in the mountains to do the same experiments that their grandparents did with the same results but don't define as torture, those ones never last long anyway.”  
  
He sloshed more of the bourbon into the glass and drained it.  
  
“Don't bother with the VH," Hale had said, “fanatics don't know how useless and dangerous they really are, and the more useless they are the more dangerous they become.”  
  
Hale reached out with a nervous fingertip and traced the line of Lightborn's shoulder in her almost sheer _dalmatica_ through the screen as if it would be enough for her to feel it wherever she was, "I always wondered," he said, “if she was aware of how very beautiful she is.”  
  
Szeraf knew better than to question the inevitability between Hale and Lightborn. There was a point that it stopped being love and became an obsession. Hale never seemed to know if he wanted to kiss or kill her, or both at the same time.  
  
Obsession could be like that  
  
His voice was rough when he asked, “Where did they last see her?”  
  
Szeraf didn't hesitate before he answered, “New York.”  
  
“She’s not there," Hale cut him off, “that’s Pearl's territory.”  
  
—  
  
Pearl was an ancient, older even than Hale, and she was the heart of New York city. The VH called vampires like her “exotics”, but New York was her city and had been since someone decided to build on the shores of the Hudson. She was older, but she had a symbiotic relationship with the city. She existed, for things like Pearl did not live, in a well not unlike a giant storm drain, with many culverts that emptied into her place, carrying the unwanted dead of New York.  
  
Pearl was a corpse eater; a necrophage.  
  
At some point in her long existence, the blood stopped being enough and the useless dead began to fill her belly. Unable to digest the meat and bone she had grown fat, the edges of her softening until they eased into a sort of sludge, a mix of old bone and rot, out of which her torso and arms emerged in the image of a woman, waved around like a turkey leg. From the waist up she was a beautiful young girl carved of bone, with white hair and blank unseeing eyes.  
  
Szeraf had seen her illustrated.  
  
New York had a lot of unwanted dead, those that were unclaimed, or unidentified, or died in prison friendless and alone, and Pearl consumed them all as she writhed like a wyrm in her own rot and effluence and shit, with the mould and fungus of the old stone, and the bodies piled up around her.  
  
Those that knew of her knew exactly why she was so necessary. Necrophages like Pearl prevented the build up of the dead and the diseases that came from them. More than one infected corpse went into the culverts rather than a grave for the good for the city, and she gobbled them up.  
  
Amidst the filth and slime and effluvience Pearl kept the city safe. If the VH knew that she was there they did nothing. Vampires never hunted New York for long.  
  
She'd eat the walking dead as happily as the inanimate.  
  
—  
  
They flew into JFK and booked into the sort of hotel that if they'd walked in with Hale carrying a body over his shoulder they would have just clucked and wondered if their abilities to get one for him were in question whilst getting someone to carry it for him.  
  
The concierge stepped out from behind his desk in an immaculate suit and addressed them both by name. His suit was crisp but his aftershave was overpowering. He informed them that a pair of suites had been made available for them, and asked if they had any requests for supper.  
  
Hale informed them that they’d be staying the night and to send word ahead that they were going to visit the Lady Pearl.  
  
These were the niceties that new vamps didn't know, and it didn’t help with maintaining their short lifespans, for as far as Szeraf knew any vampire that made it to fifty was liable to make it to five hundred. They never lasted that long.  
  
They needed a reason, Hale said, something to get them past the hunger, because for those first years it was easy - there was the hunger.  
  
Vampires evolved by feeding. The VH called it their lore. Those first years were about survival, gathering enough lore that they could think past the hunger. After that, the reality of eternity settled in.  
  
A vampire’s lore was entirely personal, most only learned to shift to a single form in their unlife and when Szeraf asked Hale he just shrugged and said, “the shape you take reflects the person you are.”  
  
—-  
  
The gatehouse to Pearl's underground kingdom was a nondescript building, the sort everyone walked past a hundred times a day and never noticed. It looked like the foreman's office for an old factory that no longer existed on a street that had nothing remarkable about it. Everything was to fool those who sought her out to threaten violence.  
  
A hunter, or even the VH with all their resources, would not have found it.  
  
From the foreman's office, complete with old desk and racks of cubby holes one the wall they took an elevator, with a grille door that rattled and jerked all the way down beneath the city. The subway above these tunnels shook the dust from the ceiling as the trains sped on their way, blithely unaware of what was beneath them.  
  
As they reached the double doors that opened to the staircase that led to her chamber and the platform where visitors waited, a man came forward with paper suits and masks. “Just in case," he said. They weren't quite hazmat suits but they were certainly close.  
  
The masks were packed with potpourri and sheer with oil stains, and when the man opened the door Szeraf was punched in the face by the stench through the precautions.  
  
The knowledge of Pearl as a necrophage turned to sludge was the barest approximation of her. There was a pile of corpses, no, a mountain of them, naked flesh piled upon older corpses and then the sludge.  
  
The smell was a living thing, and then there was sound, like a wet slap and drag and then she emerged, pushing her way through the corpse's, arms and legs falling away to reveal her in all of her glory.  
  
She was beautiful but as something so utterly other that words could not do her justice. From her hips was a sort of living slurry where the ghosts of past meals pushed their way through the mucus as ribcages tangled with each other and the sharp points of broken bones, some shoved through the existing gaps of other bones, in the black putrescence. But, above the slug part of her, she looked like she was carved from something eternal and precious.  
  
There was no color in her, but. she shone, and her beauty was both profane and divine.  
  
Any name she had had before became lost in the totality of her. She was Pearl because she looked like she was made of one.  
  
She had the same lush sexuality as Lightborn, that cold marble concupiscence as if the very embodiment of lust was given form in stone that would not yield to touch.  
  
She created the obsessive need to reach out and touch, to lose oneself in the wells of flesh and desire, but to do so would lead to inevitable consumption.  
  
“Young one," she said in a voice that was like the grating of bones against each other with wet breaths interspersed, “why have you come?”  
  
It had likely been decades since someone had spoken to her. There were those that served her, but Szeraf doubted that she did more than wait and feed in the nest of bodies she built herself from those that collapsed from the culverts above. So when she spoke it gave the suspicion that dust fell from parts of herself that she had not used in years.  
  
She was the sort of monstrosity that Lovecraft had written about, a shadow of an ancient horror that dwelled in the folds of reality.  
  
Looking at her, feeling her blind white eyes turn to look at him, Szeraf wondered if the very sight of her would drive him mad.  
  
"Is she here?” there was something approximating hurt and longing in his voice when Hale spoke.  
  
"No," Pearl whispered. “But she came to me, she threw those who serve me at my feet. She built a temple where the blooded could worship her. She told me how the world belongs to us. She told me how the cattle would flock to her banner. Then she lamented that you did not come. She is gone, young one, long gone, but how she wept for you, glorying in the flesh and the blood as is her nature. Half a year she was here, but she hunted only among those who came to her, who worshiped her. She did not invoke my wrath, only my pity.”  
  
With that, Pearl curled back in on herself like a snake, an abyssal monstrosity with the knowledge of the city. She inherited the minds and memories of those that she consumed.  
  
“Thank you," Hale sounded heartbroken when he spoke.  
  
“You are young," she continued, “disruptor, the pebble in the pond, that which destroys all that he touches. She is your curse and your burden. If she is your queen then you are her king." And she sank back into the pile of corpses and the wet susurration of it sounded like laughter.  
  
—  
  
Hale went back to the hotel like a broken man with his head down, and he snarled at a street vendor trying to harangue him into buying something by getting into his face and tracking him, he split open his mouth to reveal the teeth there.  
  
The vendor nearly jumped into traffic to try and get away, but Szeraf caught him before he fell. “Effects audition,” he said, “what do you think?”  
  
The man's answer was succinct, "I think your friend’s a psycho.”


	3. I am terrified

In your blood, the fetish  
The prize of a million teasing moments blind  
Will release you from the circus, the railway  
But the gravity between us will keep us safe  
**IAMX** - _I am terrified_

  
**Twenty years before.**

  
The girl was wearing a leather jacket over her bra, hanging open as she danced. The music was thumping and wands of light crossed the room through the remaining dry ice and darkness and the crush of dancing bodies so the old meat locker was hot and the man said, “the KLF are going to rock you.” And the crowd screamed along.  
  
She was wearing skin tight black jeans cut off at the knee so they looked like makeshift capri pants and a pair of block heels with a strap around the ankle as she jumped and moved to the music. Her red hair was cut harshly, with straight bangs that ended just above her eyebrows, and her lips were painted plum dark.  
  
Every eye at the rave was on her as she danced, her short black leather jacket showing the elaborate ink along her spine, as she twisted and moved and jumped with her arms above her head. The heavy beat was drugging.  
  
She would occasionally flash her wrists and the myriad of bangles that she wore there or the thick band of lace about her throat.  
  
She was beautiful and almost lost in the music like a priestess of Lost Ereshkigal, feet stamping and arms waving and the chains of her tattoo, twisted through blooming spikes of asphodel, up her spine, sprawling over her hips, under her jeans, and shoulders, flashes of it on her when she moved. There was a tree at the heart of it, Yggdrasil, with a great serpent twisted through its roots so that it's head rested just above the dipped waistband of her jeans, with golden eyes that almost seemed to reflect their gaze. She stamped her feet and jangled her jewelry, including the beads about her waist, and waved her arms, like the music had pulled her into a trance.  
  
A man pushed his way through the party to dance with her and she saw him she grinned with sharp white teeth and raised her head to match his gaze as she danced. “We're justified and ancient" the woman in the music sang, and the man leaned in to scent her like he was an animal. Her hands were twisted in his black hair, making the white stripe in the center of it, more pronounced. He was shirtless and barefoot in tattered jeans and as they danced the crowd watched and hungered.  
  
The music and Dionysian rapture came to an end with the song, and the stage lit up from below. A woman stood on the stage in a white corset with white jean cut-offs, thick black pantyhose and boots laced up to her knees. Her hair had been dyed platinum blonde so many times that it had the look of straw teased into points like the whorls of a painted sun. “The new year is coming,” the woman cried out arching her back to better carry her voice, “a year that belongs to us, we will rise up my brothers and sisters," she was bellowing out her polemic and the revellers had turned to her, and were whooping and hollering, waving their arms above their heads and screaming out the word “Lightborn" over and over like a chant.  
  
The man with the stripe of white hair took the red head's wrist to pull her away from where the crowd whooped and hollered and yelled and the woman led them to their frenzy with promises of how the new year would be theirs, and he pulled them through the heavy metal doors, slamming them behind him with a loud clang.  
  
As she closed and zippered up her jacket, a floppy-haired Hispanic man offered her a machete, "I swear to god, Lyds," he said, checking his wristwatch, “you cut it finer every time.”  
  
“The _Rosmarinus_ won't hurt me," Lydia replied with a toss of her hair, "I’m not one of them.” Through the metal door, the triumphant telling had turned into screaming.  
  
Hale went to the door, "I am. McCall, Lydia, on the count of three.”  
  
He pulled the door clear away and threw it into the crowd on the other side as if it weighed nothing, revealing the monsters within.  
  
The Rosmarinus mist was something that Lydia created in the lab that Hale had built for her in an old warehouse he bought outright just to give her a place to work. It was a particularly toxic mix of all the things that hurt vampires but not in enough strength to kill as that would have made it too big to use effectively. Aerosolized and placed by McCall in the vents it had filled the old killing floor where the vampires had held their rave. The music was still pumping but in the fingers of light, sweeping back and forth over the crowd, the revelers were transformed - brows low and wide, and mouths split open as if by an ax blow. Their fingers were sharpened like dagger points but their skin was sloughing off like folded paper revealing angry burns where the meat sizzled and stank.  
  
"I love to dance," Lydia said as she pulled the machete from its sheath. “Gentlemen, shall we?”  
  
—-  
  
Lydia shook the blood and viscera from her machete and surveyed the pile of bodies that McCall was severing the heads from with a heavy ax, just in case. The air stunk of old blood and burned and scorched meat. There was acidic bile and other terrible things coating the floor where the Rosmarinus mist caught in the lingering dry ice. The music was still playing.  
  
She pushed her machete through the loose belt of wooden beads at her waist and was gingerly stepping through the muck, waiting on Hale making the usual comment he always made about open toed shoes, but instead Hale picked her up and threw her through the back door, pulling it tight and shattering the lock. She landed on the floor, skidding across it and throwing her hands up to stop herself colliding face first with the opposite wall, and as she got to her feet she wondered what the hot sticky mess that had splattered her just before he had thrown her.  
  
—-  
  
Hale looked up at Lightborn where she hovered in all of her glory above the mist. She gathered blood from the remains of McCall, twisting it into a ball, moving it back and forth between her hands. She had formed from the mist behind McCall, driving her hand through his chest and pulling her hand upwards, tearing the young man into splattered strips.  
  
Before Hale could open his mouth to speak she smiled, crooking up her mouth at the side, “tit for tat, lover," she said and then exploded into a shower of bats.  
  
He was already running when he became a murder of crows in hot pursuit, swooping through a window. When she reached the rooftops she became a wolf running along the flat roofs, and leaping over the gaps between them, knowing he would the same.  
  
When he caught her in his maw she turned human in his grip, taking the female figure that she preferred with her ankle in his mouth.  
  
She was laughing. She normally had a swathe of blood around her like a sash but she had eschewed it and was naked before him. His jeans had not survived the transformation but he didn't have the marble otherness of her skin but facing her he blazed in his inhumanity.  
  
It was as if the human was consumed by the vampire within as he changed. The golden pinkness faded from his skin until he was pale bone white and his eyes blazed black like black holes sucking her in, a purplish blue forced its way into gashes of color in the inky whiteness of what he became.  
  
“There you are, lover," she had a grin like a knife edge and the way she lay pushed her breasts forward. “Are you finally going to do it, Derek, are you finally going to be my sire and kill me?” She stretched her arms up above her head so her breasts pointed up as her spine arched towards him, and slightly parted her thighs to bare her sex to him. A jewel twinkled there like a precious secret she chose to share.  
  
Hale raised his hands, claws bared, above her.  
  
—-  
  
Lydia returned to her hotel room and showered, bagging up her ruined clothes so they could easily be destroyed. She sent a page to both Hale and McCall to let her know that they were safe before she dressed and quickly braided her hair, leaving it wet over her sweater.  
  
Unless she was hunting she kept the mark on her back covered. Most people guessed, wrongly, that the were tattoos but she had Hale check daily that it hadn't spread. The things in the ash tree moved. The serpent coiled around different parts of the roots, tighter or looser as it wanted, and the flowers bloomed and faded. Normal tattoos didn't do that. Yet it wasn't a tattoo or a back plate, or whatever they were called. It was a reminder of what she’d suffered and survived. It was what defined her but it was a definition that terrified her.  
  
Hale told her that she wasn't a victim, she was a survivor, and a survivor got back up no matter what.  
  
Waiting on the response to her page, with her pager clipped to her bag strap, she went to the coffee shop of the corner where they had agreed to meet just in case things went south and they were separated.  
  
Seattle was famous for its coffee so a girl in a black roll neck chenille sweater and blue jeans with a bag over her shoulder wouldn’t look amiss, even though her hair was wet, and leaving a wet mark between her shoulder blades. She took a seat in the corner where she could watch everyone coming and going and pulled out her notebook and pen.  
  
She was on her second peppermint tea when the boy sat at her table, sprawling himself over one of the leather armchairs that had been left out for customers. He had a lean loveliness and eyes like golden beads and Lydia knew just from the way that he moved that he was a vampire.  
  
His cup stank of ginger sharp enough to sting her nose. “You're thinking," the boy said, “will I make a scene? Do I want to risk going against you here or am I just here to intimidate you? Is this a bizarre coincidence where we both just wanted tea.”  
  
“Are you going to pretend that this is all for tea?" she asked, “or that you're a newborn not strong enough to have scented me across the city?”  
  
“Let's not pretend," he sprawled on the seat, and his lips were a perfect bow, “we are both in a position where if we go the collateral damage will be, well," he spread his hands, “and we’ll probably not kill each other anyway. You see as closely as Hale watches me I watch him. It’s part of what we are, this thing between you," he stopped, “if you had touched him, or if he had touched you, there would not be enough of you left to make a smear on the floor. I would be so firm in it that they would speak of it for years to come, because of what you are, and because of what I am.”  
  
"I had always thought you were a girl,” Lydia said primly, “you must excuse my ignorance in this.”  
  
“I am whatever I want to be," he answered and when he noticed Lydia’s blank response he continued, “oh I’m sure that he’s told you that the shape we take reflects blah blah blah bullshit," Lightborn drawled. He was wearing an oversized tee with batman on it, with the sleeves and collar ripped away to show his collarbones, and jeans with heavy boots. His hair was shaved close to his head except for a fall of it over his forehead from the crown. A piece of jewelry, like a branch of a tree, curled around the shell of his ear. A trio of moles formed a triangle on his cheek. He looked very young. "It is bullshit, we are the way we see ourselves to be; the way we expect ourselves to be.”  
  
“And that’s not bullshit?” Lydia couldn't help but press. It was her nature, she sought knowledge and the mark on her back felt like molten steel against her skin like it had when it was new. After what she had gone through she wasn't scared of death anymore.  
  
"In your head, you have this vision of yourself," Lightborn said, “wide hips, big tits, flat tummy, heavy thighs, like a _donii_ but modern, lovely. You know you are beautiful and that your hair is red, but if you had the ability to change then that is the form your flesh will find, how you see yourself in your mind. A fat human who is thin in their head will slough off the pounds, a thin person who sees themselves as fat will balloon. People think we can change into wolves and bats so when they learn to shift these are the forms that they take. Different cultures give different beasts, of course, but something like a man becoming a woman or vice versa, or short or tall, those things are unique, because you need to think of yourself as neither so it doesn't matter which you are. You can be both if you want, it all depends.”  
  
"On what?” Lydia asked.  
  
“On your prey," he answered, "I am whatever I want to be.”  
  
“And what are you to him?” she asked, sipping her tea.  
  
"I’m his reflection," Lightborn took a swallow of his tea. "I hate coffee," he admitted, "I’m too old for this bullshit. These pretensions come and go, sometimes it's tea, or it's chocolate or it's wine, but me, I like a stale beer and live music.” He sighed, "I knew him when he was human.”  
  
“Why Lightborn?”  
  
When he smiled it had too far too many teeth, “When he bit me, when he turned me, it was like I was reborn in light. It suits me, don’t you think?”  
  
She admitted that it did. "I’m not going to kill you tonight," he said, “but the young man who was with you didn't get that luxury because I wanted to make a point. You are going to leave, and you're not going to come back. You're going to go where he won't follow you.”  
  
Lydia’s gesture of reaching into her boot for her knife looked natural but he tracked it with his gaze. “What makes you think I’ll go?” the handle felt reassuring in her grip.  
  
“Because it’s inevitable," he told her, “because it's easier, because if you stay you’ll convince yourself that he will change, and that he’ll love you back, because that’s who he is. He’s a good man and he’ll be honest, and honourable. He’ll be patient and understanding and that will make it worse. You’ll love him and you’ll wait. You’ll watch him stay the same and you won't. Oh, what you've been through will probably have slowed your aging, but you’ll tear yourself apart day by day, and he will be kind because he’ll never understand.”  
  
“Why are you so sure this will happen?” Lydia had to ask.  
  
"I saw the two of you dancing," Lightborn told her, “I saw the way you touched him. I saw it happen. And it always happens.”  
  
“Then why not just kill me?” Lydia didn't understand why he hadn’t, why he came here to talk to her.  
  
“Because it happened to me too.” And then he was gone, turned into mist, leaving his cup on the table.  
  
He was right, she needed to leave, before it destroyed her. The mark on her back still burned, she had gotten it because of Hale, and Hale was patient and he was kind but he did not suffer, and maybe that's what Lightborn wanted. He wanted Hale to suffer the way he did.


	4. Hurts

Leave me in chains  
Strip me of shame  
Caress me with pain  
'Cause I'm down on my knees  
and I'm begging you please  
**Mercy** \- _Hurts_

 

**Eighteen Months before.**

 

The vampire was huddled into the shadow of the space between the dumpster behind the small bar. She had her arms around her knees and was rocking, banging her head against the dumpster as she rocked, back and forth, humming tunelessly.

Hale had tracked her for nearly two weeks.

She hunted, but she never fed. She would track her prey, but at the last moment she would pull away, she would lock herself away, wait until the worst of it had passed, perhaps tear apart rats and take the edge off her hunger.

It baffled him.

She had broken into a clothing store, using the flat roof entrance and taking only new clothes from the rack, when it would have been easy enough to break the window and go in, she probably wouldn't even appear on camera. She had just taken a scoop neck tee, with long sleeves, pushed up to the elbows, and a pair of high waisted jeans.

Her boots were doc martens laced up tight and covered in mud and road dust.

There was a pendant in the well between her breasts, a silver thing that burned against her skin but she didn't take it off, sometimes she took it in her hands as she hummed, she didn't even seem to notice her palms smoldering.

“Are you done?” Hale asked, squatting in front her in the alleyway.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked, her face was split open to reveal her teeth but he got the impression that it was because she couldn't control it.

“I considered it," Hale offered her a hand, “but it's been two weeks since I've been in town and you haven't fed. You're a new bite, certainly not more than a year, but you're resisting the hunger.”

She bit into her own arm, tearing away a huge chunk of flesh, there was no blood in her veins.

She had been a handsome woman, perhaps features too strong to be classically beautiful, slim and athletic but she moved like a predator. It was not the liquid, the susurrus of the way vampires moved when their muscles and joints became nothing more than memories that held them together when there was the blood and the change and nothing between, but the way that a cat moved. She hadn't walked, she slinked like a cat, with a swing of the hips designed to draw the eye to her high, boyish ass. Her breasts were neither too small to be worth mentioning, or too big to be an impediment or draw. Years of exercise-trained her body to slimness, and she moved like a dancer on the stage, that careful, trained way that they drew the eye.

The pendant was part of a gorget, a wolf rampant surrounded by arrows, it was a very specific design and one he recognized.

She had used her sex as a weapon.

Now it was all that held her together.

Her hair, which had been a dirty blonde, was tugged back in a loose and messy knot. Her eyes shifted colors, her natures warring with themselves, and tearing her in two, and the only human part of her left was the dimple at the end of her nose.

Her pendant burned a line and welt on her skin.

“Kill me." She said. It was a hiss from the base of her throat.

“I thought your kind was supposed to kill yourself.”

He knew her, of course, he knew her. Her kind was obvious. It was in the way they moved, the way they held themselves like there was a weapon slung across her back. “I don't want this, the hunger, it burns." Her hands were claws now, the fingers razor sharp and knife fierce. She started to scratch at her face, but her nature healed her as soon as she did it.

“You’ve resisted this long.” He pushed up his sleeve, her eyes were fixed on the veins there, “you can do it a little longer, there’s so much you could do, you just have to resist, you have to hold on, I can teach you, I can help you.”

“How do you do it?” She asked, staring at his wrist as if she could see the heart beat.

“I let myself go, it’s like I’m made of smoke, when I don't hold it in I can be anything I want to be, and I’m not hungry.”

She grabbed at the necklace and instead of taking the wrist he offered her she pressed the pendant inside his hand, closing his fingers around it, “I have a niece, as close to me as a daughter, like she was my own, I want to," she sniffed back and scrubbed at her face with the side of her hand, her tears were like blood. “I promised her," she said, "I promised her,”

“Hush," he whispered with his hand on hers now, with the chain hanging down between them. “You can survive this, you don't have to be a killer. You can resist the hunger.”

She pushed her hand through her hair, leaving bloody weals that healed, “show me how.”


	5. Take me to church

No masters or kings when the ritual begins  
there is no sweeter innocence than our gentle sins  
in the madness and soil of that sad earthly scene  
Only then I am human  
Only then I am clean  
**Hozier** \- Take Me to Church

 

 

The girl was angry.

Szeraf couldn't remember if he had ever been that angry, and he sure as Hell didn't know why Hale took her in. She’d tried to jump Hale in an alley and rather than sending her packing like he did with most of the hunters that tried their luck with a big name vamp, he took her home.

Maybe it was just because she was so young.

Allison Argent couldn't have been eighteen. She still had a face round with baby fat and a scar that ran the length of her torso that had clearly been inflicted by a vamp. By the time she had met Hale she had put a few down.

Maybe Hale had decided that Szeraf was too old and that the girl was his replacement.

Szeraf never asked about the ones that preceded him. He hadn't wanted to ask about them. He supposed he knew the answer. They either died or retired, but Hale never spoke of them.

So Szeraf trained her. 

He corrected her stance and taught her to fight and to survive. He taught her about weapons and about books. He taught her to take care of her wounds, and how to draw a bath to soothe her muscles, and he taught her to cook and to make Hale's fancy coffee. But all she wanted to know is if they were going after Lightborn, or when they were going after Lightborn, or if they were ever going after Lightborn.

Szeraf kicked her foot with his. “Watch your feet," he chided, “if you don't take care of your footing you’ll end up on your ass. If you get knocked down by a vamp you won't get the chance to be anything other than dead.” She sprung back to her feet in a gymnast's movement, then spread her feet, bending her knees. She had a fake knife, wooden and properly weighted but harmless, waving in front of her like a god-damn feather duster but Szeraf figured he'd get stance in long before they even attempted weapons.

She was nowhere near ready to go into combat, but she was stubborn and she seemed to think herself far more capable than she actually was.

Hale hadn't said to teach her.

Szeraf knew that if he didn't then it wouldn't be worth clearing out a room in the Millhouse for her. She'd continue hunting until she got herself killed, probably within the year.

Girls like her should be dreaming of boys and prom dresses and boy bands and whatever it was that kids like her were dreaming of - not hunting Lightborn.

Szeraf refused to consider that she was young enough to be Claudia’s daughter.

If Claudia hadn't died.

It Claudia wasn't dead long before she was born.

The girl was stubborn. She didn't want to eat; to sleep; to even shower. Her obsession with Lightborn was almost as fierce as Hale's own.

She made Szeraf tired just looking at her.

He supposed he ought to be attracted to her. She was pretty enough, she had brown curly hair that she had hacked off at the jaw, big brown eyes, and like that, she bore a resemblance to his Claudia, but her jaw was too wide, and her smile too toothy. Her features were broader than Claudia’s had been. Claudia had looked like a doll, lovely and small, but sometimes, just for a moment, he'd see her out of the corner of his eye and think it was Claudia. But Claudia had a soft, impish naughtiness that Allison would never share, but for moments, just a moment here and there, he looked at her and saw Claudia. It broke his heart every damn time.

He wondered if that was why Hale had adopted her because she could have been Szeraf's daughter.

Maybe it was just because she was a stray.

It was a wonder that the Mill House wasn't full of local cats and dogs.

Hale already fed them. And paid for a local sanctuary that took them in. And paid a carpenter to put up shelters and lean-tos in the local woodlands that were his land.

Most vamps saw small animals like snack packs. Hale insisted on humane traps for the rats that they got every autumn when the weather turned. They traveled too much to justify keeping one of the cats. It was why he shooed the cats from Hale's bed, and once a week sprayed it for fleas. Just because they didn't eat Hale didn't mean that they left everyone else alone.

Had Hale been a person, a human who had never been turned; who had never met Lightborn, he would have been content with a simple life, comfortable clothes, fancy coffees, lazy chairs, archival mysteries and a bevy of cats.

He would probably be up early to visit the farmer's market in town and smile harmlessly at women unaware that he was devastatingly handsome, as he bought artisanal raw milk for his spoiled cats.

But those were not his circumstances, he was turned, but remained a good man. Then there was Lightborn.

Everything changed for Lightborn.

Szeraf didn't know who started the war between them. He only knew that it was war, and the only survivors, when he and Hale had met, were Hale and Lightborn.

But Szeraf knew what Allison would never really understand.

Under all that hate and bile and violence; beneath the gore and new bit and death Hale loved her.

If he hadn’t he would have killed her four hundred years ago.

Szeraf had found it when he was cleaning, a locket with a filigree trim, no bigger than his thumbnail. When he opened it both sides were filled, the left had a lock of hair in a red ribbon pressed under glass, and the other was a miniature portrait.

As far as Szeraf knew it was Lightborn before she was turned. 

It was a beautiful thing, tiny and framed in gold, showing a demure maid in a black gown on a cobalt blue background. The details of her dress were clear, even to the bones in her bodice, and the lace shawl around her shoulders that dipped down to show the barest hint of her breasts. She had dark brown hair peeking from under a white linen cap. She wore a lace choker, and from it hung a gold H with two pearls hanging from each post.

She had the most striking eyes, they were the same gold color as the filigree of the locket, and even painted five hundred years before, her mouth was a plum pink kissable smear. Her throat was a tall column and drew the eye more than her jewelry. In her hand was a small sprig of flowers, with long strings of purple-red flowers that descended below the end of the painting. Szeraf later learned it was love-lies-bleeding.

Szeraf had seen so many images of Lightborn, photos; sketches; portraits, even a few statues, art deco things cast in bronze and carved from marble. Images of her in motion, or static, beautiful and deadly and as immortal in stone as she was in reality.

Yet the demure maiden in Hale’s locket was possibly the truest image of her that existed.

Allison wouldn't understand that. She was too young. She hadn't lived. Whatever it was that had given her this hate it wouldn't explain his obsession to her.

Hate like Hale’s couldn't exist without love to feed on.

  
—

Hale brought in supper. It was Indian in thick paper boxes. There was saag paneer, and aloo gobi, with freshly made naan and a six pack of Indian lager to wash it down with in one hand and fried chicken and waffles with gravy in the other.

He spread them out on the table, before taking his coffee tumbler, hanging from one finger by the handle, down beside his chair and from the pocket of his jeans pulled out a paper bag from the coffee shop.

He had picked up the tumbler on one of the jaunts he took without Szeraf, and it had the star wars rebel logo on it, he was strangely fond of it, and it was what he preferred to use when he bought coffees, beside his chair.

After twenty years together Hale knew that Szeraf would eat just about everything as long as it was cooked but spicy food would give him heartburn, and very greasy food gave him indigestion, so he was shopping for Allison clearly. If she had food allergies she hadn't said so he got a variety of both vegetarian and meat dishes.

Szeraf didn't drink often, and when he did he preferred bourbon, Maker's Mark if he could get it, so the lager was for her too. Hale had never cared about things like legal drinking ages.

Szeraf just didn't know why _her_.

There was a new book in Hale’s other back pocket, and when he opened the bag from the coffee shop it had two of their most expensive cookies, Hale had never outgrown his sweet tooth.

His evening plans were set then. He wanted a quiet night with a new book, and a dry soy caramel macchiato with an extra shot of Ethiopian fair trade coffee, two of the white chocolate, macadamia, and cherry cookies, and comfortable socks.

Allison was disdainful of the food. “Why aren't we going after Lightborn?” She asked him again.

“Reasons," Hale answered.

“Reasons that you won't give me." She was determined to push him. Hale remained barely amused, fingers running over the spine of his new paperback. Hale liked archival mysteries, the goofier the better. It was on sale beside the counter in a supermarket he had to have it, and he'd read it a few times before it went into the root cellar with the other old books.

Two hundred years of well-read pulp novels had created a labyrinth. The damp had turned the paper to a mush that had hardened like the walls of a giant’s wasp’s nest. Szeraf didn't like going down there, unsure if it was going to collapse on top of him and crush him, or if the rats had created a civilization worshipping Hale as a creator god and fully intended Szeraf to be a sacrificial offering.

It seemed entirely likely when he was down there.

There might have been an ongoing joke about it being an altar used to summon the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. He had, after all, invented the crime story.

“You're not ready," Hale told her, opening his new novel. "If you went after her you'd die," he was frank and honest, turning the pages to find the first page of the story. And you'd get Szeraf killed and that isn’t something I want to pursue.”

"I’m a Van Helsing," Allison protested, "I’ve been trained to kill leeches since I was born.”

“Bullshit," Hale never had inflection when he said things like that, it was a blank statement. “I’m a vampire, Allison, I can hear it when you lie. Try again.”

"I’m Allison Argent, my family are the ones that killed the Beast of Gevaudan. I am descended from thirteen generations of vampire hunters. I know how to kill a damn leech.”

Hale stood up but he didn't put down his book. “If you can land a blow on me we can go after Lightborn now, you can use any weapon you like, I won't even fight back, in fact, I won't even put down my book.”

 

It took a pathetically short amount of time, without taking his eyes from his book, held out in front of him with one hand, and the other behind his back as he let her go for him, with a long-handled fire ax. He sidestepped each attack easily, letting her over-extend herself. He let her clang the ax’s blade against the brick floor of the mill house with a heavy clang, then pick it up and try again, and again. She didn't get close to him and he seemed to pay more attention to the paperback than to her, and the longer it went on the angrier she got, and the more she overextended.

Finally, he reached out with one foot and tugged hers out from under her so she landed on her face.

“No Lightborn," he said, offering her a hand back up, “your supper is getting cold, and I know my cookies are, Szeraf, how do we heat them up in the microwave?”

Allison was panting, her face slick with sweat. “How many people are going to die tonight because you want cookies?”

Hale sighed. It was a loud, slow exhalation. "If you go out there it will be a bottom feeder that kills you." He said it calmly, like he was reciting a phone number, or ignoring a cold caller trying to sell him something. ”What’s the VH term for vamps like me and Lightborn, Exotics?” He let her wait for a few moments, “We don't need to feed like your new bit. When Lightborn is active we’ll know about it. Until then you need to train, to learn how to survive, and when I know you're not going to get yourself killed then we hunt. Until then Jones and Payne are going around Bavaria looking for Nazi gold, and they’re still looking because I haven't gotten past chapter three.”

“He doesn't like being disturbed the first time he reads that crap," Szeraf said, spooning more of the aloo gobi into a bowl for Allison to eat before it got too cold.

“Too right," Hale agreed, “this is book six of Payne and Jones, eventually they’ll save the world.”

"I’d have thought,” Allison wiped the sweat from her face with her wrist, “you'd read classics, like the Russian novels.”

"I did," Hale told her, turning the page as he spoke, “when they were crappy pulp novels no took seriously.” He stopped for a moment, “Russia was cold, the winters were so cold it was hard to breathe, but the summers were blistering. There was a wind that rolled through the city that smelled of summer, like wheat; sweet and warm like new cookies. You could smell it in the quiet streets even when the winter meant that you had to wear heavy furs and Shuba, valenki boots and mittens.

“There were stalls that would sell pies, and bakeries, tucked away out of sight, but they would make these fantastic pies, the samovar pride of place in their kitchens, but the pies, they’d make little birds and flowers out of pastry to decorate them, and for a smile you could get a candy, prunes dipped in chocolate from women with hands red and heavy from making bread, and they'd throw balls, fantastic things in rooms spiced by gluhwein in great kettles, and they’d ladle it into little glass bowls.” He was quiet for a few long seconds. "I loved Russia. It used to be the center of culture. St Petersburg and Paris were caught in a terrible competition to see which could be the most sublime. I was a simple Englishman, wowed by London the first time I went there. I thought I'd choke on my own tongue when I met the queen.”

“How old are you?” Allison asked, awed.

Hale just smiled to himself, ducking the question.

—-

Natalie.

There were advantages to money, Szeraf knew, and one of them was Natalie. He was sure that Natalie would not give a man like him the time of day if he didn't pay her. She knew she was kept, and it did not bother her. She was beautiful, with red-brown hair and soft eyes, perhaps she was older than conventional beauty preferred, but so was he.

Hale paid for her apartment and her bills and an allowance for whatever she wanted she had never come close to using all of.

When Szeraf texted she was always available and waiting, dressed and make up perfect and she understood.

Sometimes all he did was rest at her feet with his head on her knee, she had a blanket of fake fur that she would drape over her thighs so his head was resting against it, and she’d stroke his hair.

Sometimes she just listened.

He knew more about her than he did about Claudia but he didn't love her, he couldn't because she wasn't Claudia.

She also understood that too.

The sex was great. They had found in each other a well of silence, a place to be honest, that they could be what the other needed without love.

He didn't love her. She didn't love him. They didn't need that.

So it was Natalie that he went to when he needed to complain. When Allison got too much with her teenage urge to throw herself at death. She wanted to go after Lightborn, she was a seething ball of rage and Szeraf was just too old for it.

He understood that the thing with Lightborn was cyclical, that she and Hale moved in circles where they clashed and drove each other apart, pulled together by their joint obsession and driven apart by their very natures. He could not kill her and she could not kill him, so they came together like magnets and then drove each other way with the same forces.

When he tried to explain that to Allison all he got was more rage, and frustration and then he got frustrated and Hale went to get more coffee and Szeraf would take a deep breath and then get in the car and go to Natalie who'd let him rant and rage or fuck or do whatever it was that he needed to do.

She’d made lasagna. She was wearing a black dress with long sleeves and a short skirt to show her fantastic legs and a thick barrel gold chain, and she laughed as she pulled out a lasagna big enough to feed four hungry teenagers. "I always make too much," she said as she put it on the counter. "I end up freezing most of it, but it's the first time in forever I haven't had a little pot of this in the freezer. I’m not sure if I need a bigger oven or a bigger freezer.”

He had made a mixture of lemon juice and olive oil with freshly chopped herbs in a glass jar and was shaking it to drizzle over the Nicoise salad that she made to accompany the meal. She loved to cook, and she had the time, and the money, so why not.

With Hale, he lived on take out, because Hale didn't need to eat but enjoyed it, so he ordered whatever had taken his fancy and didn't worry about heartburn or MSG migraines. He lived on sugary caramel drizzled coffee and never gained an ounce. Szeraf worked off every pound like it was a labor of Hercules knowing that an extra ounce here or there might be enough to get him killed.

He was tired.

He didn't want to be replaced, though.

Perhaps that was Hale's intention, to put him out to pasture, a field somewhere with good grazing and a blanket when the weather turned like an old mule.

“The worst thing,” he told Natalie as he dressed the salad, “the one I can't get past is that sometimes when I see her out of the corner of my eye, she looks just like Claudia.”

“Did Hale know her, Claudia I mean?” Natalie asked as she put the lasagna on the trivet on the breakfast bar between them.

“No," he answered, “he's seen photos certainly, but he was too late to save her." His hand went to the scars on his thighs almost without noticing, “he was nearly too late to save me.”

“So it’s not intentional.”

"If it was it wouldn't be so awful, I turn around and for that one moment, I see her and my heart stutters. She’s just so young, in all the worst ways, she doesn't understand and it’s going to get her killed, and all I can do is train her so that I don't go down with her. She's so full of rage and passion and I remember being exactly the same and it got me nothing. I wish she had known Claude, because then maybe Claude would have taught her what she taught me, that it's okay to be angry but the instant you let it control you it’ll just burn you out.”

“Do you know why she’s angry?” Natalie sat down at the breakfast bar and poured the dressing over the salad, tossing it lightly.

“She thinks Lightborn killed her aunt," looking for something to do with his hands he unwrapped the napkin from around his cutlery, spreading it out over his lap and smoothing the edges down.

“Did she?” Natalie for all of her softness was very good at seeing through the fripperies, it was one of the reasons that Szeraf valued her.

“Probably. I have no idea who her aunt is or why it should matter. Lightborn has killed thousands of people, she enjoys hunting and killing, I can understand Allison's grief but she doesn't want to stop Lightborn because Lightborn should be stopped, but because she hurt Allison and that’s the stupidity that’s going to get her killed.”

“Does she understand about Hale?”

“That he can't kill Lightborn, that he only ever slows her down. That they're caught in this fucked up cycle of death and destruction and sex and whatever else goes on between them. No, I don't think she knows at all.”


	6. On a Tuesday in Amsterdam long ago

She is the film of the book of a story  
Of the smell of her hair  
**Counting Crows** \- _On a Tuesday in Amsterdam Long Ago_

Sometimes it felt like her laugh hung in the air. It was a loud braying sound and she became so invested in it that when she laughed she damn near flung herself from where she was sitting in the way that she rocked. There had never been malice in that laugh, even when there should have been.

He had a song stuck in his head but he only remembered every other word.

Hale looked at the building from his vantage point. It was an old jailhouse, abandoned when a bigger, better building was erected across the district, but he could see why she had chosen it. It was defensible, had large underground parts and was clearly well known for gang behavior. Even now a vamp with a false gangster limp was prowling outside.

Patrolling the building Hale made fifteen vamps, old enough to think beyond the hunger, to take orders and obey an older one, but not old enough to be able to resist the compulsion. If Lightborn was their sire, as she probably was to create such an elaborate trap, and Hale knew it was a trap the same way he knew the sun rose in the east, he wouldn't be able to overpower them simply with his Lore.

They patrolled closely enough that one would have to be taken down to enter the building and it would be less than five minutes before the next one passed by, barely enough time to take out the guard, cross the car park and open the door. Certainly too much time for a human, even if they took out the guard unseen.

She really had thought of everything, hadn't she.

He could feel the vampires inside the building, new-bits, less than a few days old, wild with hunger and enough of them that he could not sense her.

New-bits were loud in their hunger, not yet having the Lore to diminish their presence, but even the ancients had no idea how to make it disappear. A vampire with enough Lore could sense their kind no matter what.

It was the heart of her trap.

Allison was keen to go into the building. She was petulant, wild as a child, with the urge to kill Lightborn. She didn't understand but Hale admitted that he had never tried to make her.

Szeraf was wiser, he had set up a sniper nest on the roof of a nearby building, and the light from the sight was glinting where Hale could see it. Then it stopped. He was in position and was ready, just waiting for the order.

An explosive shell filled with _Rosmarinus_ gel, an improvement made by the VH on existing tech, fired from a sniper rifle would certainly cause a vamp’s head to explode if they were young enough, and none of those around the build were more than a few years old at best. They were old enough to have just transcended the hunger and too young to defy an older vampire.

They were Lightborn's favorite kind of flunky.

Hale raised his hand as the guard approached on his patrol.

The sniper rifle wasn't loud. There was no sound; just the visceral pop and then clatter as the vampire’s head exploded and his body fell to the ground. Allison was there, movements sleek as a dancer’s, with her hatchets, Hale had insisted, Szeraf preferred an e-tool, and one went into the vamp’s chest and the other came down on the neck to remove what remained of the head, just in case.

“Keep the door clear.” Hale told her, “don't engage unless you need to if it looks like it’s getting too much for you, fall back. Szeraf is giving you cover, you are giving me cover. Don’t get reckless and don't get stupid. Stay cool." He said and slipped through the door. He hoped she’d listen, funerals exhausted him. “The vamps inside, I can save them, but I need you to keep the door clear.”

With the door closed behind him, but not locked, in case he needed to call Allison in, he started his transformation. He started by pulling his shirt over his head and kicking off his boots, making the most of the minutes that they had bought him, because ruined clothes would make it harder to escape, people tended to notice young men covered in blood in torn clothes and assume he was the one who had been hurt and tried to help. So he stripped naked apart from his briefs and changed.

His monstrous form, as he called it, was larger than he was as a man, perhaps eight foot, and was closer to the idea of a werewolf, his hair erupted down his back in a thick stripe as his shoulders raised up on either side of his head which dipped down. His face stretched out in a muzzle and his hands formed claws, but instead of the usual maw of a dog or wolf his was a black hole of teeth and lashing tongue, and his eyes blazed black.

Strips of blood lore formed on his skin which had turned an ashen gray color and the stripes were a dark blood red, like a tribal tattoo in thick pointed swathes that the ancients could read like a language.

Hale often felt closer to himself in that form, but he only took it when he knew there would be a slaughter.

He was no stronger, but it intimidated. Fear was as much a weapon as his claws.

Knowing that they would fear him, that they would be terrified of him, he ripped open the door to the room where they were clustered, throwing it behind him with a roar.

Mad with hunger the new-bits roared and hissed back, incapable of any transformation but the split mouth to reveal their shiny new teeth, small pointed needles like those of a fish.

Sitting in the middle of them with a child on her lap was Lightborn, she was cooing to him and reading to him from a book about a witch and her cat.

It was then that Hale realized what it was that she had done.

It had a terrible beauty.

The child was the sire.

If Hale killed the child the new-bits around him would, over the course of a few hours, revert to human, and the vamps outside would react in their nature, they would slaughter them all.

“Hello, lover," Lightborn said raising her head.

With the fight dragged out of him Hale turned back into mostly human, keeping the blue-gray color of his skin and the red slashes of his lore so they matched. “Stiles," he said.

"I hate when you call me that,” she said, running her hand, her fingertips sharp as scalpels, through the child's hair. Hale could see the crust of old blood around the child's mouth, but the child himself could not have been more than four, lithe and slim, but still with the little plum belly and round face, his eyes were large, green like Hale’s own and his hair was black. He had a nose like Stiles’, slightly upturned at the end as if in the womb he had been touched there by an angel to gently correct behavior. It was as if the child was a perfect mixture of the two of them and that also was what Stiles wanted.

This whole thing was a game to her.

She wanted to hurt Hale and she had turned all of these people to do it, knowing he couldn't save them but he'd try regardless.

She was sat on a busted couch, it looked like it had been gored displaying foam and springs through holes, but the entire pelt of an animal had been draped over it to protect her from touching it, and the child was on her knees with her arms around it as if he was her’s; as if he was theirs.

“This is Scott," she said, “say hello to papa, Scott." The boy lifted his hand and waved then turned back to Lightborn.

"Mama, I’m hungry.” Lightborn's smile was like an ax blow, it was a thing of violence and malice.

“Soon, my little honeybee, soon.” She said, stroking his hair, “when Papa is gone.”

“Even for you," Hale said, “this is...”

“What we are," she finished, “killers, predators, a cat playing with mice, you can pretend to be a mouse all you like, Derek, but you are a monster, you're like me, why not accept it?”

“This is just cruel." He said. “I thought you were beyond this.”

"I am what I am, you gather your little human children, you raise them and lead them to their deaths and you call me cruel. Scott here will never want for anything, he has me.”

“Mama," the boy that she called Scott was saying looking up at her. “I’m hungry.”

“Oh darling, Papa's here, can you wait?” her voice was soft and pleasant as she spoke to him.

“I don't wanna.” The child said.

"I know, darling, I know, but sometimes we have to wait, it just makes it yummier when we can feed, but there’s no one here for you to eat, darling, can you wait for me?”

“It's an abomination." Hale breathed. There were few things that the vampires all agreed on and one was creating vampires too young to look after yourself. The entire point of this child was that Hale would kill him, so Hale would know what it felt like to kill him. It was not to do it because Lightborn wanted a child, it was so that Hale would know was it was like to kill a baby, and this child was toddler fat, he was a baby, with sharp little teeth and a child's hunger.

And if Hale did kill him then all those new-bits around him would return to their humanity, and the vampires outside would feast on them, and having been turned and turned back in that tiny window of seventy-two hours, would not turn again. They would die.

Lightborn raised her hand the new-bits raised as one, like marionettes moved by her strings, and left the room, “lock the doors behind you," she said, “we wouldn't want you to overhear, take Scott with you, he’s hungry.” One of the new-bits, a woman in a stained yellow sundress and single sandal lifted the boy and held him against her hip.

“This is obscene, even for you," Hale said.

“I had long since thought I was beyond offending you, but hark, your new familiar is here, and to think I named the baby for the old one.” She was laughing, amused with her own cleverness, as if the terrible things she was doing were fun.

The room was so bleak, the concrete floor polished but stained and covered in the detritus of years of squats, the furniture stained and torn, the couch she sat on had only three legs, and one of the arms was completely bare of both fabric and stuffing, showing the pine boards underneath.

The fur she sat on was clearly her own. She had loved fur as a human, loved the warmth and decadence of it, of how it felt against her skin and she clearly retained that.

“If I believe you wished to keep the child..." he left it open.

“Oh, how sweet of you, darling, that you'd allow me the child, an eternity of his tiny little teeth and temper tantrums, would he evolve beyond them with his lore, would he become a man, a monster, inside a baby’s frame, is that not also obscene? abomination? She flung his words back at him. “You are making the assumption that I turned him, that I made him what he is, but I did not, I am just not one to overlook such potential.

“It's delicious, seeing this struggle in you. I had long since thought you have evolved beyond it, that you had become cold to our little games, cold to me.”

Hale launched himself at her with a roar that shook the remains of the glass in the window frames. And it was with a laugh that Lightborn joined him in the air.

It was a collision, an explosion of flesh as he threw her against the wall, hard enough that dust rained down, and she laughed. She laughed when she collided with him, the force of the two of them causing the door to bow outwards. “Oh, I’ve missed you.”

With claws they tore at each other, throwing gobbets of flesh to the floor and ignoring as it grew back as quickly. He sank his fangs into the flesh of her shoulder and she just pulled away leaving the meat behind, hanging from his mouth, and her blood staining his face. It took everything he had not to run his tongue around the skin of his face, trying to catch it all.

Using his chest as a platform she launched herself back to hover in the air above the broken and stained couch, “Look at you," she hissed through the cage of her fangs, “look at what you are? You're magnificent, and yet you pretend to be cattle.

“Even now, outside are your human pets, tell me, lover, if you use a plastic bag to lift their shit like a responsible owner.” He changed his form even as he flew across to her, elongating his arms to catch her, but as he did she turned so the attack instead pulled her back against his chest. “I’m sure a dog would be more pleasant company, love, they could even keep your feet warm when you read.”

Hale was too angry for words. 

Lightborn often had this reaction on him, sometimes he tried for eloquence but more often there was this collision between them, when an impossible force met an immovable object, because she would not be swayed and he could not be what she was. That was the divide between them, it was a schism of epic proportions because it would never be resolved. She could no more stop her grab for power than he could forgive her the innocents she slaughtered in her path. She saw the vampires as the rightful rulers of the world, and he saw them as a parasite to be removed.

“Is that what they are to you, lover, dogs to be replaced when the old ones grow too feeble, when their joints ache and they sleep the day away? It happens so fast. I used to keep them, you know, human familiars. People to take care of the nonsense of a human existence so I did not have to. Then were there those who blood was so sweet, so flavourful that I kept them just to remind myself how sweet they were, never taking more than a sip, and how they loved it, they'd come to me, begging me to feed on them.

“But I never touched them, never like that. Even now, these years later it's only you I want to touch me like that. Perhaps it's because you're my sire, lover, that I only want that from you, only ever from you.”

She turned and for an instant, just an instant, he saw her as she had been when she was alive, the quiet demure boy in the pretty gown, with his hair, pulled up behind his head and caught in a snood or cap, and the bright gold Hale H on a choker around his throat. He saw the dip of his jaw and tightness of his lips that suggested he bit down what he wanted to say, and when Hale had asked him he had said it was nothing.

The bite had meant he no longer swallowed down the words. He had become Lightborn and Lightborn spat them out without a care who she hurt.

Lightborn didn't care what others thought of her, if she didn't like it she’d just kill them.

The rest she used to feed.

If they desired her she was sexy, if they feared her she was monstrous. She was fluid in her own skin, neither male or female, just whatever it was that she needed to be to lure in her prey.

He could admire her that.

It was the same admiration he could offer a tiger for its stripes being such excellent camouflage.

A thing could be beautiful and powerful and deadly, the presence of one did not undo the meaning of the others.

The blood stripes had formed a pattern of tight chevrons down the knobs of her spine.

The female of the species was more deadly than the male.


	7. My vampire heart

So let in the light  
Turn me to dust  
If it don't end in Bloodshed dear  
It's probably not love  
**Tom McRae** \- _My Vampire Heart_

 

**Twenty-Five years before**

 

Lydia Martin was incredible math.

She understood the universe in numbers and quantifiable vectors. There were algorithms in place wherever she looked and it brought her comfort to know that where things were unknown, as things certainly would be, that they were simply math no one had unraveled yet, but she was prepared to try.

there was comfort in simple things. She had taken up knitting to explain graphs that existed in forms too complicated to draw on paper, and found the simple ease of it caused her brain to form leaps and bounds that she later had to trace back.

She was sat in the coffee shop, the radio playing Sophie B Hawkins for the fifth time since she had come in here, and her cup coming on empty. Her needles were flickering in her hands, she was following a pattern, a Japanese charted thing she had borrowed from an exchange student and copied on the universities photocopier on the sly because the secretaries tended to get annoyed and complain about wastes of paper. The students were meant to use the photocopiers in the library but there was always a huge queue, and Lydia was postgrad anyway.

She had started studying in pure math and moved into theoretical physics by her second year, still annoyed that she had to do courses that didn't appeal to her to make sure she had a broad spectrum of what she wanted. Then she had moved from Boston to California to work with a professor who was doing what she was working on and she had never looked back.

She supposed she could get her doctorate if she wanted but she wasn't sure she did. The University couldn't afford another expert in her field and it was too esoteric for industry to care. She was adrift in a sea of numbers and thin Japanese yarn spun with steel to make a sweater she wasn't sure she wanted to wear.

The pattern was just intricate enough to keep her engaged and simple enough that she could allow part of her mind to drift into its sea of algorithms and formulae.

She was certain with a complicated enough knitting pattern she could solve Goldbach's conjecture.

She barely noticed the man who sat at her table. It wasn't the only table in the Bean, the coffee shop she preferred, and it was not that there was only one seat there. Whoever this man was he had sat there for her.

He was tall, hard-bodied and blonde, blue eyed with a jaw that looked like a sculptor’s dream. His hair had a sort of cherubic curl, "I’m Isaac,” he said with a smile.

She turned her knitting to start a new row, slipping the cable needle into her hair where she had placed a half ponytail to hold it. She was wearing an old plaid overshirt worn into softness, with jeans, over a pretty cambric camisole covered in little red flowers that felt like it should have been part of a pair of pajamas.

She had bangles on her wrists that clattered when she put down her knitting, to take a mouthful of her, now cold, coffee.

She felt uncomfortable in this man's presence which she never did. He was wearing a black Pearl Jam tee over a long sleeved tee and whilst he picked at the cuffs like he was nervous.

“Aren't you going to give me your name?" he asked.

“I didn't plan to, no," she said, as she started to work on the next row. She was mentally doing the math to see if she had enough money for another french press and a cookie in her jeans. The french presses they offered were better value and taste than the machine coffees they made, but they had a drip machine with infinite refills. Most of the students went for that, but Lydia had gotten a taste for fine coffee and what little extra money she had gone to it. “There are lots of other tables.”

“But you're sat at this one.” He offered her a grin.

He looked like an angel from a Renaissance painting, dressed for a performance of a garage band, and he was sat at her table.

Yet something about him made her skin crawl.

She remembered reading that for a long time that it was only recently that angels had not been something to fear. She half remembered a line from a poem or a song, she wasn't sure which, that angels had knelt obeisance to God with one wing perpetually dipped in blood.

Isaac looked to one of those angels, covered in blood and as beautiful and dangerous as the dawn.

Yet he seemed nervous, trying to charm her and yet picking at his cuffs, worrying the threads and she was aware of it. When he saw her noticing it he smiled and his grin was far too full of teeth. “You see, I think you're gorgeous and I know a party not far from here and I think if you go with me then I’d be the luckiest guy in the room, even if you abandoned me straight away I'd be the one to have brought you.”

It was flattering and Lydia wasn't immune to flattery. It was something that she had tried to work on all of her life. She was a mathematician and physicist, she was brilliant, incredible math, but she was also pretty, with bright red hair and wide green eyes and a mouth she was told was made for kissing. Puberty had given her a soft roundness and she was small, with heavy thighs and round breasts and she wasn't sure if she hated it or not because sometimes her beauty gained her things and sometimes it got in her way. She would never be the Fields medal winner if no one took her seriously because of the way she looked.

It didn't matter to this Isaac that she was one of the most accredited and published students that Caltech had ever known, to him, it only mattered that she was pretty.

There was the dilemma, she liked being told she was pretty, there were times that she even used it to her advantage but she was also hindered by it. Of all the things he could have said to flatter her, he had picked the wrong one.

He seemed to realize it as soon as he said it, watching her expression, but even that seemed a little quick like he had known her reaction before she herself did.

“Look," he said, “it’s not far, and you look like you could use a break, I've said what I want, it's not a lot, just to show up with the most beautiful girl in the county, and you can always leave if it's not your scene. We can walk there, it's a lovely night, and you don't even have to talk to me if you don't want to, it's just," he stopped, “you looked sad.”

She tilted her head at that, she had no idea why he would think that.

“I just hoped," he scrubbed his hand through his hair, “well, I figured if I hit on you that you might smile, hell, for all I knew it might have made your day, I don't know if you were having a bad day or just a bad five minutes, but, I hoped I could help.” He seemed very small as he said it, and he was handsome, she had a can of mace in her pocket and a rape whistle, and the first thing she'd done when she moved to Boston with her parents to attend university early was signed up for self-defense classes, and then krav maga classes. She could look after herself.

Maybe she just didn't look it.

One of her professors had called her his little Georgia Peach right up until she put in a written complaint to the head of the department. Things like that had always left a sour taste in her mouth.

She put away her knitting, putting it into the canvas tote and leaving a few dollars on the table as a tip. “I don't think I’m dressed for a party.” She said.

“Oh no," he said and there was a predator in his tone, “you're perfect as you are.”

 

Everyone at the party was as beautiful as Isaac, that was the last thing that Lydia realized, that they all looked sort of unearthly, and sometimes when they laughed it felt like ice on her skin, and there was food but nothing she wanted to eat and liquor but nothing she wanted to drink. She felt cossetted and safe and warm and the music was charming and sort of folksy and she felt like she dreaming or floating on a warm ocean on a hot summer's day.

They were gathered in clusters around tables covered in red solo cups and bottles of liquor none of which she recognized the labels of. Laughing at jokes she didn't get but there were people there like her, lolling into the way they ran their fingers up their arms like they were following the veins.

She wasn’t sure why.

She just felt safe and warm and loose, like all the numbers in the universe surrounded her like a hand knit blanket, like the first one she made when she was learning that, was heavy and soft and when the woman came up to her she kissed her because why would she not. The woman was beautiful and she wanted her.

She sat on the edge of the bed as the woman kissed her, and her kisses were cold and part of Lydia wondered why she wasn't afraid, she should be afraid she thought, but she wasn’t she felt warm and safe and loved.

She was lying on the bed, with her bra pulled open and sharp teeth on her breasts when the screaming started.

—-

There was an ease to the years that followed, numbers sliding into puddles when she tried to catch them in her mind. There was the woman with the silver white hair and the cold fingers and that’s all there needed to be.

She was cognizant of being dressed and painted like a doll and that she was beautiful. There had been men who came to praise her beauty, so soft and pillowy in comparison to the woman who loved her who was tall and thin and her fingertips were hard and cold.

Lydia loved her. She was not always aware that she loved her, or why she loved her but she never questioned that she did. Sometimes there were things she could not understand but view through a lazy ease like molten wax.

There were things she almost comprehended but then the realization would slip away from her.

There was violence, she was aware of it, and a child with needle teeth who would curl up on her lap and laugh who had hair like thorns. Yet when she went to take one of the tiny cups from the counter of her lady’s table it was slapped away from her hands. “Oh no, lovely," she said in a voice like warm molasses, “that is not for you.”

There were beds like marshmallows and the lady’s cold mouth upon her sex like divinity and orgasms like the lapping of the sea upon the shore.

There were wardrobes full of designer dresses, hand made to suit her curves. There were soft jersey stripes cut low to showcase her breasts and clinging to her hips, and then there were nights in silk sheets with the lady with the sharp teeth and cold fingers.

Her lady was beautiful, but she was the lady. She had an inhuman beauty, of the glacier like cheekbones and eyes like burning coals. Sometimes Lydia felt like she was surfacing from a deep lake, kicking madly towards the light, but then her lady dragged her down. There were kisses and cold fingers on her soft breasts and then there were lips and the knowledge her lady loved her. That her lady would always love her.

There were baths of milk.

There were worlds that bent to her will.

She just had no will of her own.

She was the toy of her Lady.

And sometimes she found herself seeing the numbers and reached for them, she tried to cling to them until her Lady was there and the numbers fell away and let her fall and fall and fall knowing her lady was there to catch her.

She would always catch her.

Her lady would never let her go because Lydia Martin was incredible math.


	8. Burn

"Oh don't talk of love" the shadows purr  
Murmuring me away from you  
"Don't talk of worlds that never were  
The end is all that's ever true  
There's nothing you can ever say  
Nothing you can ever do”  
**The Cure** \- _Burn_

 

 

Allison looked at the tableau before her.

Hale was monstrous, his shoulders rolled up like those of a werewolf in a picture, with ripples of hair that formed a line down his back, his hands were gathered into claws and he forced his words through the cage of his teeth.

The white stripe of his hair blazed incandescent like a line of white fire in his black hair.

Facing him was Lightborn.

It was the first time Allison had seen her.

That was not quite true. Allison had seen her in photos, there had been images of her in the Van Helsing stronghold when Allison had gone there. Kate had shown her Lightborn, had shown her how to recognize her, but she had a presence and Allison had no preparation for that. She had thought that she would be ready to face the vampire that had killed her aunt.

In truth, she could not have known.

Hale had misled her.

She had thought that the simple man with the white stripe in his hair was what the vampire was. That he was the man that pulled his feet up on his chair and drank his coffee and read his trashy novels.

She had made the terrible mistake of thinking he was human.

He wasn't human. He was a leech and she could see that now.

And she could see the lore that rippled beneath his skin, and how his transformation was not the total of him, any more than the man in the chair had been. 

He was as dangerous as Lightborn was.

And if he was a vampire then she was a God.

Her skin was white. It was not the white of a pale person, but instead the shining white of polished marble, and if not for the hard stripes of her lore on her skin she might have been a statue in a museum, naked and lovely. Her hair was a shock of hard pink melting into red, swept away from her head as if it was fuck swept, and her eyes were black but for the iris which was a blazing red, and her black lips were pulled back to reveal fangs as she smiled.

Sitting on her lap was a child.

All of the rage and hurt and grief that Allison had known since Kate’s death welled up in her and she spoke before her mind caught up with her. “Who’s the Marilyn Manson wannabe?” she asked although she knew. She could feel it in her bones. The very air seemed to sing her name but Allison would not voice it.

And Lightborn laughed.

“Is this your new pet, beloved?” she asked and even her voice seemed to shimmer in the air of the abandoned room.

The room was empty apart from them and the old battered couch that Lightborn sat on as if it was a throne, running her hands through the child's hair.

“Is that yours?” Allison asked eyeing up the child in her arm, “a baby so you can play at Mommy- like your womb isn't barren within you.”

Allison had expected violence when she had spoken, she expected the words to hurt and for Lightborn to react to that hurt by putting the child aside at best, at worst her fingers would dig into his scalp and hurt or kill him.

What she didn't expect was that Lightborn would laugh.

She had a laugh like a choir of bells, both brilliant affirming and mocking.

Allison felt diminished and enriched just by being in her presence.

How could she, so pitiful with her mortality, hope to kill a god?

But that god had killed Kate.

Everything cycled back to that singular thought. This was the being that had killed Kate.

Kate had been her world, her aunt, her mentor and her best friend and this was the being that had killed her.

Gods died all the time.

Allison was an Argent. She was a Van Helsing. She existed to put creatures like this down.

She would not let herself be overwhelmed. She was a Huntress and as powerful as she was Lightborn was only prey.

She tightened her hand on the knife that Hale had given her.

“Allison," Hale lisped it out through the cage of his teeth,  his tongue catching on the S so it was replaced by a th. “I told you not to come inside.”

He was monstrous, there was no chance that he was anything other than a danger in this form. He had a sort of powerful virility, like the cover of a romance novel, barefoot on the stinking concrete and Allison knew that, but she also knew that the building was full of vampires and that he was the only thing holding them back.

“Oh, lover," Lightborn said with a grin like an ax blow splitting her face open to show the rows of needle teeth, “she’s adorable, is she one of the kitties that you keep, you always used to find those strays, leaving them food like they were incapable of hunting. Shall we strike a bargain," she nuzzled her face against the cheek of the boy in her lap, “you can keep your pet and I’ll keep mine.”

“Allison," Hale hissed. “GO BACK OUTSIDE.”

“Such a disobedient puppy,” Lightborn clucked, “are you going to be a good boy for Mommy?” she asked the boy, “are you going to go with the lady for Mommy.”

“You monster," Allison said.

“Allison," Hale repeated, moving finally to shield her from Lightborn, “go outside, it’s a trap. Believe me, go back to Stilinski and,”

“She killed Kate.” Allison answered, “she killed my aunt.”

“Did I?” She shrugged, it was a roll of her entire body, thrusting up her tiny breasts as she did it. Even with the child, who couldn't be more than four or five, perched on her knee, she was a vision of concupiscence, although she was, by her nature, more androgynous than Allison had expected of such a sexual being.

Despite herself, Allison couldn't help but find her sexy.

In what training she did learn that the Leeches often took idealized forms of what they had looked like. It was simple self-perception, and the older they were the more fluid their forms became. Lightborn was old, long past the point where she had become an Exotic, and she appeared as she believed herself to be. That was why Allison could feel the pull.

"I have killed so many people, do you really expect me to remember just one of them?” she asked, “I probably won’t remember you after today.” She was carding her fingers, tipped with claws, through the child's hair, and he was curled up against her. Yet despite the pose and the child, she did not look in any way maternal. She was like one of those statues in churches that were almost obscene but still in poses of maternity, so she represented both sexual voracity and puritanical innocence.

She reminded Allison of one of those marble statues where a man's fingers were pulled tight about a woman's thigh and the flesh pursed and dipped under that, in an erotic fashion, but it was still cold stone. That for all the puissance and motion and emotion in the statue it was still stone.

She was the embodied promise of both sex and violence.

With the child on her lap she looked like a madonna from the mind of Clive Barker and yet, as terrifying as she was, Allison desired her.

She didn’t know if she wanted to worship or fuck her.

But this was the vampire, the leech, that had killed Kate.

It happened so quickly. It was like a switch had been flicked and the hand that had been carding through the child's hair suddenly pulled away and took the head with her.

And that was when the screaming started and Hale lunged, “darling," she said, smiling at Hale, as she dragged her claws over her throat, leaving a trail of blood on the skin so it stood stark against the grey of her complexion, "I’ll see you in New Orleans," and vanished into a cloud of smoke or flies, it was hard to tell.

Hale wrapped his arms about Allison and leapt upwards, crashing through the concrete ceiling, then using his foot to launch even further and ran, supernaturally fast, dumping her on the roof of a nearby building before he turned back, “STAY HERE," he barked before he returned to the old sheriff's station where the screaming had started.

It would take a long time for Allison to register what had happened, angry that she had been taken away from the fighting, screaming and spitting like a cat.

Hale killed all of them. 

Everyone who had been at the sheriff's station. 

Everyone.

Then he burned the place down.


	9. Cosmic love

And in the dark, I can hear your heartbeat  
I tried to find the sound  
But then it stopped, and I was in the darkness,  
So darkness I became  
**Florence + the Machine** \- _Cosmic Love_

**Eighteen Months before**

 

Peter Hale was a _Schattenjaeger_.

One of the things he hated about America was that despite being in a bar, albeit one in the badlands of Louisiana, if they had red wine it came out of a box, usually one covered in dust. In Ron’s, although Ron's what Peter did not know, there was a choice of bourbon or beer and anything else saw you called a fairy.

Peter knew some fairies, they might have been offended at the comparison.

He walked to the door, scratching at his head. The sweat made his hair feel like it was alive with lice. The weather felt like the steam from a newly opened shower door. It was a hot muggy night and even the mosquitos seemed quiet.

It was no cooler inside than out, despite the air conditioning.

There was a mist he waved away from his face with his soda bottle complaining under his breath about damn vampires.

The woman shouldered past him on her way inside. She was attractive in a blunt, pointed way, with dark blonde hair tugged up into a ponytail and a man's henley that fell off one shoulder to show the line of her neck and shoulder. She had tight black jeans and a pair of battered sneakers. The sneakers seemed so out of place he made a point of noticing it.

On a leather thong, around her neck, she wore a silver medallion, an oddly shaped thing, like it had been snipped from a gorget, with an embossed design on it but even as he cataloged these things he didn't pay her much mind.

She was just a woman going into a bar in Louisiana.

On another night he might have tried to fuck her but it was too hot and the beer had tasted like fermented rats piss that someone had carbonated.

He stood out there with his bottle of soda, drinking it to get the taste of the beer out of his mouth, it had been a tasteless local thing, but the soda wasn't much better.

He was just draining the bottle when the screaming started.

There was more cursing when Peter went back into the bar.

The woman was gone and in her place was a beast, and had the bartender on her claws as she ripped into him with her maw, using the bar as a support for his weight, and the blood was pouring out into the sawdust and beer nut shells on the floor. It didn't seem to bother her.

The others were frozen in fear, large truckers and the sort of men you automatically labeled with the stereotypes of beating their wives and loving their trucks, all huddled together under tables and unable to move, their entire bravado washed away with the piss running down their legs.

“Anyone not of the supernatural persuasion out!” Peter said walking forward.

The truckers left, running in a way that they tripped over each other and their own feet to get out. Peter didn't give them any heed as he muttered under his breath.

The beast turned to look at him. She was roughly the size of a bear, broad shouldered with a head as large as his chest. Her fangs seemed to be the size of his hands, but he was not impressed.

The transformation was forced, lines of black forming veins on her face and bulging through the fur of her arms.

When Peter raised his hand he held a ball of fire and in the other a vial of holy water which he smashed into the side of her face, giving the ball time to work. “This is my bauble," he said, “I picked it up somewhere, works much like a miniature sun, and you are not nearly old enough to have developed an immunity to it.” The ball was taking its toll, draining the strength from her until she finally let down her prey and in doing so her transformation started to collapse, leaving the pretty woman in the beast's place.

From behind the counter, Peter pulled the bar tender’s shotgun, satisfied that there was one, it was old, but when he opened it, it was loaded and he put it to her head. “When in Rome.”

“Stop.”

The vampire behind him was much older than the one on the floor covered in blood. 

Peter was not so new to his inheritance that he was sure he could take this new man, even with his false sun blazing.

“Kate,” the new vamp said, cupping her face with his hand. "I shouldn’t have taught you,” he said, “I thought you were strong enough.”

Whatever humanity had been in Kate was gone, he snatched the pendant, "I’ll give this to your niece," he said, and then without stopping he pulled her head clear off.

He turned to Peter, “ _Schattenjaeger_ ," he used the old term, “she was a Van Helsing, I had thought," he stopped, corrected himself. "I had hoped.”

Peter rolled his shoulders, “we all make mistakes, do I have to put you down?” He made sure to look at the vamp, old and powerful, but the figure of a young man, strong and vital, indistinguishable from human but for the white streak in his hair that came from the crown to his left temple.

“I haven't fed on a human in a very long time,” the vamp said, there was nothing of regret or even remorse in his voice over the dead girl on the floor. He had killed her without question. “I thought she might be like me.”

“And what makes you special?” Peter asked him.

The man shrugged. "I don't know," he answered, his tone clipped. "I’ve wondered about that for a very long time.”

“Are you who I think you are?” Peter asked him.

“Depends on who you think I am? I know you, _Schattenjaeger_. There is a war coming, the attacks across the country, the missing people, it’s Lightborn, she’s building an army.”

“And what do you expect me to do about it?” Peter was still holding the shotgun and he considered lifting it to aim it at the vampire in front of him.

"I don't know,” the vampire said. “You are the _Schattenjaeger_ , are there more of you." Peter didn't correct him that there were not. There was only ever one Schattenjaeger, and when one died the next was chosen, the marks of office appearing on his person, the brand on his shoulder burning in. There had always been a _Schattenjaeger_. There would always be a _Schattenjaeger_.

They had been knights in Europe, now Peter ran a bookstore and helped stem the tide.

And now a vampire was telling him of a forthcoming war.

But if he was the vampire that Peter thought that he was.

"I need a drink,” Peter said, he walked around the counter and lifted one of the bottles of top shelf bourbon, pulling out the cork with his teeth and taking a few long swallows, he offered the bottle out but the vamp was gone, turned to mist like he had never been there, trusting that Peter would do what was necessary.

Peter finally let the bauble die out, putting the ball back in his pocket. With all the spirits spilled the place would burn, but when he turned back to the girl, the one who had caused all of the havoc, her pendant was gone.


	10. Losing my religion

I thought that I heard you laughing  
I thought that I heard you sing  
**REM-** _Losing my Religion_

 

**One hundred and fifty years before.**

 

München looked different in the winter night. The moonlight fell upon the snow that layered the garden of the palace so it looked like it was lace and crushed glass beads on black velvet. There were torches here and there in the garden and some attempt had been made to brush the snow away from the walkways so the couples would not soil their hems when they walked away from the main party. There was laughter and the clinking of glasses against each other, of knife against plate and a chamber orchestra playing a jaunty air.

Stiles had his dark hair piled up with combs and clips to highlight the back of his neck. “Lovely isn't she?” Sebastian said, offering a glass of wine to Derek. Or at least he hoped it was wine. With Sebastian it was hard to tell.

“She?” Derek asked.

“A new conceit," Sebastian said softly, “she is whatever she wants to be, sometimes she is she, sometimes he is he, are you so surprised that this would be how she becomes?”

Sebastian seemed amused in that infuriating gallic way of his. He was a handsome man, the sort that oozed sexuality like a stink clinging to the folds and creases of his skin. He was swarthy, dark eyed and haired, Provencal in all of his manner and even his dress, but he had cut away the tail of hair he had had the last time Derek had seen him.

Sebastian had been Stiles’ companion for the last two hundred years.

Derek despised him.

“The last time I saw her,” Derek found the pronoun strange and almost alien to him. Stiles had always been he, even when he wore dresses. Even those early months where Derek had pulled him unto his knee wearing corsets and shifts, his hair curled and loose down his back and ear fobs hanging from his ears. It had seemed so exotic to Derek at the time, this boy from the stage who had sung his bawdy songs in a gown, flaunting breasts he didn’t have- before his manager told Derek that Stiles had been interested in him, and would he like to meet him afterward. Even then he had been a boy, just one dressed like a girl. “The last time I saw her she told me that you did not like boys. That you did not desire her.”

Sebastian's laugh was like a caress, rough farmer's fingers dragged across skin.

“Do you see that man there?” He pointed the figure out, he was tall and slim with ears that stuck out at right angles from his head and his hair slicked with a parting. “That is the king’, as far as the people here know she is his mistress and that’s why he built her a palace, but she is a lie, you see the king has a lover, but it's not her, it's him," he pointed to a bear of a man in his shirtsleeve arm wrestling with another man, he had blonde hair and whiskers and a cruel look to his mouth. “That is Paul von Taxis, and the government does not care that the king has a lover, or even that the king's lover is a man, but that the king is clearly the one getting fucked, that offends them.” His entire demeanor suggested that they were small minded for even thinking it. “He does not desire her, even if he was in his male form, but instead me, but I do not care for boys, Stiles was right about that much.”

He looked across at them, there were people, possibly those who were unused to carousing in Germany, drinking wine, but there was laughter and men drinking from great mugs as they sang loud drinking songs, pinching and squeezing at the serving girls who had their blouses pulled down to show as much of the crease between their breasts as possible.

“That man there, the drunk in the velvet cap,” he pointed the old man out, he was dressed finer than most of the nobles but it was clear that he did not belong among them. “He’s an artist, reasonably talented, trying to milk the king for every sous he can get." In some things Sebastian remained perfectly French. “The king seems to think that he is worth the investment, we are working on breaking that. I suggested eating him," he put more emphasis on eating, “but it's been a long time since I've felt the urge for blood. I enjoy it, but I don't care to chew through the leathery old neck of a common artist, why, when I can sup on kings?”

"I never understood your asceticism," he said, “I had thought it as if you were building up to feeding on men, but you still feed on rats and other vermin like the lowest fledgling.”

“For the blood is the life," Derek corrected him. “And blood is blood, whether from the highest king or the lowest rat. You supped on the king, did his blood taste differently?”

Sebastian's chuckle drew Stiles’ eye, he still looked boyish, even corsetted and swagged his breasts seemed small and his waist too thick for the ideal nymph of German fashion. There was a triangle of moles between his mouth and his ear where Derek had loved to drag his the tip of his nose when he brought his teeth sharp against the line of his jaw. There were sausage curls about his face so that when he moved his head the fobs flashed through with the rubies catching the light.

He was as lovely as he had been in London all those years before when he had sat on Derek's knee and pulled up Derek's hand to place it on the space between shirt and stocking where the flesh was shockingly hot, taking Derek's mug of ale and draining it in a single swallow.

In many ways he thought Stiles would always be that boy, blowing kisses to a drunk audience, but winking at Derek in the crowd.

It had been the desire to keep Stiles for himself that had seen Derek take him from that place, and set him up in that manor in the country where everything changed.

And now Stiles was wearing a wide scarlet crinoline, cinched in around a waist he did not have to spill over salopettes with the tip of little red shoes from under the layers of skirt.

“She loves you," Sebastian said, “she has only really ever loved you. The tragedy is that she hates you as much as she loves you, and she hates you much more than any one person could ever bear.”

“and how does she feel about you, Sebastian?” Derek was jealous, he knew he was jealous but could not keep the words inside him or the bile from his being.

“What am I to her? I’m what you should have been, her companion, her teacher, the one who initiated her into the ways of what we are.”

“And what word will you use to describe us, the Van Helsing's call us Leeches, the _Schattenjaegers_ call us Boochies, the Greeks call us _vardoulacha_ and those east of us call us _nosferatu_ , what word would you use, Sebastian?”

“I read the most interesting short story, some English doctor or other, he called us Vampyre, I found I like the word, it has a pleasant taste in the mouth, why it sounds almost French.”

“They call you _La Bete_ ,” at that something complicated flashed across Sebastian's face.

“I am not _La Bete_ ," he said, “but I loved her, my Emilie, and I failed her. I do not know why your girl could be so stupendous but mine became little more than an animal. I tried to save her, I tried to keep her, but she became something else.” It had a simple finality, Sebastian was jealous but it was a jealousy that he could never act on. He might have served as his teacher but Derek was his sire.

“And Stiles has not?”

“You don't deserve her," Sebastian said sadly, “but I am not the one who gets to make that decision for her. She makes those choices herself. You bound yourself to her, you created her, and she is drawn back to you like a fly in a spider’s web, but you cast her aside.” Sebastian went to move across the room, away from Derek but a hand on his shoulder stopped him.

Sebastian's eyes were glowing blue like embers of solid ice under which someone had placed a miniature sun. “You are a fool who thinks himself one of the _vache_ , you have not been for nearly two hundred years, do you know what the Van Helsings call you, the disruptor, the pebble in the pond, the destroyer. You sacrifice and go without and they will never see you as anything other than a predator, you argue with her, you fight, you will go over to her, you will tell her you cannot be with her whilst she feeds despite it is what we are, then you will fight, and then you will fuck, because it is the terrible cycle you place upon her, you are the one who has trapped her, and she is caught because she loves you as much as she hates you.

“You claim your human morality but you are not human, we are something different, powerful, and you destroy her because she loves you. All that you have created is because you love your morality more than you ever loved her, the Van Helsings speak of her in wonder, and she's not even old enough to have evolved her lore past the need to feed, something you will never do. You prize your morality more than her.

“I loved my Emilie, I lost her when I tried to turn her, you turned Stiles when you lost her.”

With that Sebastian wrested his arm away.

“They call her Sang Real,” Sebastian said, “the Queen of Blood, and you are not worthy to speak her name.”

He calmed himself, the unholy light fading from his eyes before he let out his rage in a loud breath. The room continued around them, the party still in full swing, the men drinking and singing, the women giggling or making outraged squeaks at the wandering hands. The king, if he was such as Sebastian described him, watched everything with a sort of naked longing as if he was utterly an outsider. Derek understood that completely.

When he had been alive there had been no real stigma to preferring men to women to warm your bed. Marriage was expected to produce heirs but it was not unusual for men to have a fond companion whom they loved dearly. Marriage was for honor and duty, and as long as a wife was careful not to be caught with a child no one cared, discretion was prized, but times had changed. The puritans had come and gone, but the excesses of the past were washed away by Victorian priggery. Powerful bores gained power and they loved nothing more than to be seen as morally superior to their fellows, and into it - the king had fallen, fifty years too late for no one to care and him to accept his own nature and find peace in himself.

A boy like himself, for he was young, barely into his twenties, would have been prized, even without his title, thick black hair, and bright eyes, broad shoulders and slim hips, he had long thighs and his limbs were straight and he was fairly complected. Perhaps his face was a little triangular with a narrow chin and broad forehead, and his ears were noticeably large. He was not beautiful, not like Stiles was, but he was comely.

Maybe in another world, he would have appealed to Derek, and he would have smiled at him, he would have taken him into the gardens with the frost crunching under their feet like the broken glass it so resembled. Maybe he would lead him into one of the quiet places where the benches were covered in snow, wiping one down so the could sit in the quiet and let mouths meet and hands wander, and wipe the mess with handkerchiefs and go back into the room hand in hand, the king's face reddened by Derek's beard.

But it was not another world, and in this one, if Derek led him into the garden it would be with the expectation that he would feed on him. He would not kill him, for he would need to, he was not some newbit too young to know when to stop, but the boy king had enough worries, unable to be himself, judged for who he was and what he wanted by men who would have shoved their hands into the fall of his pants without care and called him a spinach poker when they led him back inside.

Maybe that was why Stiles preferred dresses.

Or maybe, he looked across at him, Stiles just liked to be beautiful.

He was beautiful. Derek had always found him beautiful. He had been beautiful in stage paint, skin whitened with nightingale powder and crushed blackcurrants staining his lips because the company was too cheap to buy good cosmetics. He had been beautiful in the quiet manor house Derek had bought him, with his hair tucked under a demure hood and the dresses he bought with Derek's wealth, seeming every inch the innocent maiden until he hiked up his skirts with a grin and a wink.

He had been beautiful when Derek fed on him, and he lay splattered in his own blood, it frothing on his lips and slipping down his jaw. He was beautiful when Derek turned him because he could not bear what he had done; what had overcome him; what Stiles' beauty had made him do.

But he had been new then.

When Derek had gone to Gevaudan to investigate the rumours there he had been beautiful, he had worn both the riding habit of a young noble woman, hair gathered at the back of his neck with a red ribbon that matched those on the pearl fobs at his ears, and in his vampire form, hair stained red like blood and skin like blue marble veined through with red, naked and androgynous, sexless, but with enamel on his claws and toenails.

He was beautiful now, flirting and laughing with some nobleman, with his hair like a black crown about his face and his lips caught between his teeth. Around his throat - the same perfect column of skin, with none of the beauty marks that dusted him, he wore a chain of silver and Bohemian garnets, in tiny petals and a large medallion from which a teardrop fell. It looked like blood drops against his skin, pooling into his suprasternal notch.

It was certainly intentional.

His gown was the same color, dark heavy satin that sounded like wind whipping through fir trees when he moved, dancing from the hands of the men at the party.

The tragedy of what Sebastian had said was that he had been correct. Derek would walk across to Stiles, they would talk, they would argue, they would fight, they would fuck and then one of them would leave.

Then, in five years, they'd do it again.

And again.

And again.

And again.


	11. Heaven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I changed the title because I was never happy with it, and when this popped into my head I knew it was right, I've never done this before but I think it was a necessary change.
> 
> Enjoy - the final calm before the storm.
> 
> Also the chapter titles - headers - do make up a mix, which will be shared at the end, but you can piece together the start of it at least

I stand in golden rays radiantly  
I burn a fire of love over and over  
Reflecting endless light relentlessly  
I have embraced the flame forever and ever  
_**Depeche Mode** _ \- **Heaven**

**Present.**

In the centre of the room as the beams of light swirled around her, green and gold and red and blue, Lightborn danced.

She was almost naked, a silk _dudou_ stretched across her breasts and tied at the back, and a slip of matching fabric with the hips pulled away. Instead of stocking body paint curled up her legs and arms, held up above her head as she danced, her hair, black with pillar box red ends, flicking and curling around her face as she moved. There was no jewellery, just the red of her hair, of the lingerie she wore and the red of enamel on her toes where her feet were bare against the concrete floor, stamping and dragging and twisting as she moved enraptured by the music.

As she danced she seemed to glow with an inner puissance, as if she was haloed by a bright argent glow that burned away everyone who came close.

She was not just a woman simply dancing in a warehouse under the flashing lights strung up there in a haphazard fashion whilst others gyrated and prostrated around her, some in time to the music, others not. They held glow sticks but she was born of light, a goddess of fertility and war deigning to dance amongst those who were caught in the reverie with her.

She did not have that verdant concupiscence, nor did she have over ripe corpulence, instead it was a sort of lank androgyny. The music pulsed and a woman sang amidst the soft hard beat changes “maybe something kind of fun, because love is just a bloodsport, son.”

Had Hathor danced like this under the blazing moon in the burning sands as bonfires surrounded her, to the beating of their drums. Had Astarte; Nineveh; Aphrodite?

Did it matter?

The music changed, a syrupy beat with a low male voice singing and still she danced, matching the beat not the tone of the song, as others moved away from the floor to fetch water, glow sticks around their throats, highlighting the line of carotid, of tendon, how with the music so loud it was like their hearts beat in time with the snare.

On the bare expanse of her back, altered only by the two ribbons that fasted her _dudou_ , she had painted, like a garish tattoo, a great phoenix, a red peacock whose tail vanished under the silk of her skirt but visible where the skirt ended.

She finally turned to look at him.

Her hair was press to her head with sweat, the silk damp and slicked to her skin, highlighting the line of thigh, of rib, of the high thrust of her small breast, and the curve of her throat against the red ribbon that tied her _dudou_ at the back of her neck.

She had painted her face in elaborate strokes- black shadow around her eyes surrounded by red and orange, with gold liner to bring out the colours and what looked like liquid copper on her lips.

His heart lurched looking at her, and when she saw him she smiled. Her mouth moved silently tracing words and he knew them as surely as if she had spoken them aloud. “I want to dance with somebody, with somebody who loves me.”

It had been the song playing the last time that they danced, when she had dragged him onto a glass floor, squares that lit up under their feet and a mirror ball hanging from the ceiling, women had danced, wearing ruffles and jean jackets, hair shellacked into ponytails and neon eyeshadows and lace, holding rum and coke and eyes down as they shuffled their white stiletto boots on the floor, under the wreaths of cigarette smoke.

He had protested that he couldn't dance, and she had laughed and said “don't worry, neither can they," before she tugged him onto the floor.

Her hand had been hot and heavy on his hips, like a brand, and the other curved around his jaw before she dragged his mouth down for a kiss.

This time she walked across the floor, the dancers parting for her like a tide, as she smiled for him. “Now?” she asked, amused and arch, not even bothering to shout over the beat. Hale shrugged. “Come,” she said and took him by the hand. When he went to speak she pressed a finger to his lips. "Not now, don't spoil it.”

With her hand in his, still large and hard knuckled, even in this female guise, she led him from the warehouse to the outside fire escape, and with a leap that was more than human she climbed them, and he followed her, clumsy with lust.

Of all the things between them, complicated as it was, lust and love were easy.

As soon as they were inside the old offices she pressed him up against the door with kisses hard as iron. Her hands, with nails bitten short and painted, pulling at the hem of his shirt, before she pulled it up over her head.

The offices had been converted into a stark apartment, a bed with a white coverlet tugged back and grey flannel pillows were thrown akimbo, a few old chairs, worn but functional, one with an afghan draped over it and a book on the seat. There was a small dining table with a potted plant. It all looked stark and open, and the wall of windows looked out on the dance below.

Everything thumped to the beat like they were in the heart of a great glass and concrete monster.

Her mouth was sharp, biting at his lips until there was blood.

Whenever they fucked there was blood between them.

The night was balmy, a hot wind blowing over Lake Pontchartrain to the sea, sweet with moss and algae as it rolled through the city.

He pushed up the fabric of her skirt, it so soft against the calluses of his hands, before curling around her high, boyish ass. Some things never changed in her, the harsh jut of her hipbones, the spatter of her moles, her large knuckles, the line of her eyebrows, and her high boyish ass.

Blood filled his mouth, tasting like liquid sunshine on her lips.

The pain simply sharpened the pleasure of kissing her, their teeth clashing against each other as he pulled up her up and against him with a handful each of her plump buttocks, fingertips dipping between them, as her short bitten nails were scratching weals over his back. “Stiles," he gasped out her name.

“Don't call me that," she said into his mouth, then dragged her tongue over the blood on his jaw, through his beard.

She wore nothing under her _dudou_ and skirt, nipples hard and pushing against the fabric, and the differing textures of silk and skin and she arched her back as she pulled his mouth, slick with blood, to the apex of her breath through the fabric, careless of whether they would be stained sheer with spit and the blood that they shared between them.

Her mouth was red with blood, his blood, and through it he could see the smears of her lipstick, and the blue-grey of her true skin as she changed, the ruddy health replaced by the lore forcing it's way to the surface like the stripes of a tiger, and her fingers were weaving through his hair, fondling and pulling at the white stripe he could not change, that had come when he turned her.

She was wet against his fingertips, urgent like it had been centuries since last they did this, and not just months. Part of this thing between them meant there was no desire for anyone else, just each other with a drive that was like insanity.

Whatever this thing between them was it drove them together and apart in an endless cycle, and in their collisions, there was fight and fuck, and more often than not they were the same thing.

The woman who had been singing earlier had been right. Love was just a bloodsport.

Her hand, strong, masculine, hard-knuckled and long fingered, was in the fly of his jeans, rubbing her palm up along the length of his cock, hard from what they were doing as his mouth nipped with sharp teeth at her through the silk.

“Bed, now.”

It was an invocation. It was a call to arms.

He stumbled forward as she fell back, not letting go of him, clashing their teeth together with loud, jarring clacks, as the ragged rug caught under her toes.

Before her knees collided with the mattress she stopped him with a clench of the hand around his cock, and took a step back, stepping out of the silk by untying the laces, all three of them, so she stood naked before him.

It gave Hale a moment to look at her as she was now, slender as a reed, almost to the point of emaciation, with narrow ribs and the sharp jut of her hips, but there was still something of boyish in her, something in the way she held her head that recalled the boy that she had been.

He had loved her in all of her guises for five hundred years. This was no exception.

In the red haired goddess was the black haired boy with the golden eyes, now black with red pupils resplendent in her otherness, but the mouth, soft and pink, was the same, the spatter of moles that formed a triangle near her ear, even if the ear was now pointed, and the hollow of the throat, even if the skin was blue grey - those were constant.

But the boy was gone.

She silenced his reverie with a rough yank of his jeans down around his thighs. As violent as their encounter was this was peace for them, nothing had been destroyed, and the only blood spilt was from his lip, curled around her sharp red tongue.

For them, this passed as love.

It had been a long time since softness between them had not turned to broken glass and destroyed furniture.

With her fingernails, still bitten short, she slashed open the skin of his pectoral, her sharp red tongue flashing out to taste the blood, staining her human teeth as her hand started to jack him slowly.

—-

After they lay in the ruined bed sheets, stained with blood and other bodily fluids, but a large stain of it spread out from underneath her, where he had, with a grin, tore out her throat, lapping at the wound before he brought her blood to her mouth in a kiss.

“Do you ever," she started, tracing designs on his skin with the tip of her finger, “do you," she started again, “do you ever," she stopped, her tongue flicking out to lick her lips, almost kissing close to his, curled as she was under his arm, “the places you've been, do you ever miss them?” It was obviously not the question that she meant to ask him.

“Russia," he answered, softly, his fingers curling through her short red hair. He lay on his back, with her on his side beside him, curled up against him, with one leg thrown over his hip so it was between them, her toes skimming the curve of his calf.

“I never cared for it," Lightborn murmured, “it was always too cold for me.”

He had no answer for that, and they lay in silence for a while. “I loved Siam,” she said finally, “the smell of the place, damp and sweet, the stink of the people crammed into close places, the rank wind that rolled off the sea. It’s different now.”

“The world is very different,” he answered calmly, stroking his palm over the curve of her biceps, “only we remain the same.”

She barked out a laugh. “The same, yes, exactly as we were." It sounded sarcastic but he didn't push it. “As a child, I often turned into a wolf, or a cloud of bats, or a great serpent to escape the parts of my day I didn't enjoy, I am not the boy you knew, love, and you are not the man I loved, not anymore." She sat up so her line of her spine dominated his gaze. “Sometimes I wonder if you ever were and if this thing between us, this," she paused, looking for the word, “chaos, was ever anything else.”

She stood up, stretching her arms up above her head walking across to the small Formica table on its steel legs with rubber tips, there was an old dining chair there, plastic and metal and inexplicably bright orange. She curled herself up on it, one foot on the floor, the other on her thigh, when she reached over and picked up a pack of cigarettes, the pack crumpled and almost empty, using a disposable lighter to light it and taking a deep drag.

“A while ago, I dunno, maybe years, sometimes the time just sort of blends together," she let the smoke billow from her nostrils, allowing it to curl up around her in curlicues, “I was in New York, I can be that specific, I don't remember when.” She looked across at him, twisting in the plastic chair, “do you forget how long it's been?”

He admitted that he did.

“It was cold and I was out of sorts," she flicked the cigarette to loosen the ash at the end into an old saucer there for the purpose, “I was all over the place, like I was about to explode into bats for no reason but my skin felt too tight and I was tired all of the time, it passed, these human conceits do, but at the time it felt overwhelming. I ducked into a movie theatre,” she watched him, lying there on her bed, scratching at the hair on his chest with her blood under his fingernails, listening to her, but comfortable. “I don't remember the name of the movie, I paid for my ticket and found myself a quiet corner to sit in. It was a silly thing, a conceit about immortals, I remember that, but about halfway through, or thereabouts, they played this song, about living forever.”

He made a noise of acknowledgement, the song was more famous than the film. "I had to go into the toilets and I sobbed for the best part of an hour, that’s what I remember about the film, that a song made me cry, after all," she gestured with her cigarette, tracing designs in the air, “who wants to live forever, right?”

“He didn't want to live forever without love.”

She barked out a laugh, it was a dark and ugly sound. “Is that what we have, Derek, love?”

“What would you call it?”

“I don't know.” It was honest at least. “I don't know that I ever did. For what, ten years after that movie, I wore my hair like she did, in those tight corkscrew curls that bounced. Do you remember?”

He admitted that he did.

“That song still brings me to tears.” She finished her cigarette in a few long drags, smashing it out on the saucer. “I wondered for so long if the man who sang it was one of us, so I made a point of asking him. I hunted him down and asked him, he was charming, pleasant, bright and shining, far too good to be one of us, and he was dying, I could smell it on him. I never envied one of the cattle so much as I envied him. He had the words I didn’t. We shared a bottle of red and a pack of cigarettes, then we parted, and when I hear him on the radio I remember him, I remember what he said." She didn't share what it was that the man had said. That she kept to herself. “I felt his loss when he died.”

"I didn't know that.”

Her smile was like a knife, a thing of violence and threat. She walked across the small apartment naked, the thumping bass still reverberating through the walls and glass that overlooked the dance party below, the room occasionally flashing orange or blue with the party’s lights. From a cupboard on the wall, she pulled down a bottle of red wine and unscrewed the cap, pouring it between two highball glasses, carrying them both across to the bed. “I’m easy come, easy go, little high, little low," she was crooning under her breath, “Any way the wind blows it doesn't really matter to me, to me.”

 


	12. Safe

This place speaks to him, it's got its own language

Cold comfort through the gill cracked plaster

Looks at him with eyes in paint blisters

Squeezes music through cheap transistors

 **Therapy**? - _Safe_

 

She waited for the weather. The first day that was pregnant enough with rain, the clouds thick and dark, promising to hold all day, then as the thick hot splats came tumbling down, reminding her of an old lyric “it's raining hammers, it's raining nails,” she took the train.

 

She had six men with her, all of them with the same sort of itchy twitchy restlessness that was typical of new bits old enough to have some control but still struggling with the hunger. She had made an effort, she was wearing the red over the knee velvet boots with a grey wool roll neck sweater dress and a red velvet coat thick with embroidery. Her hair was black, unusual for her because she had always styled it the colour of blood but it was too much with the coat and the boots. She wanted to look every inch what she was - the queen of blood.

 

Under her breath she was singing, “drop of a hat she's as willing and playful as a pussy cat, then momentarily out of action, temporarily out of gas, to absolutely drive you wild, wild..”

 

She made a gesture with her hand and then the screaming started.

 

—-

 

The rain held for days, after the first initial downpour the clouds lingered, darkening but never bursting, so they were like over ripe fruit hanging over the city, and the air was almost damp as it rolled over the city between the lake, the river and the sea.

 

She watched the weather with a morbid delight as she waited, she watched the news run over and over and over again about the missing train and its passengers, uninterested in what they said as she waited for the weather forecast.

 

It had to be timed correctly.

 

It would have been easier in the upper cities, in New York, or Boston where the weather was reliably bad, where new bits wouldn't be overwhelmed by the sun; when their hunger would be its peak. She managed it, of course, little tasters so they knew what they wanted, lying across the chair she had appropriated as a throne, wondering if she should bother with a crown. She could certainly fashion one, perhaps an iron rebar twisted in a circle to show her strength, or something lovely and shining from one of the stores in the city.

 

She had always liked garnets, even before she was a vampire, marvelling at how they glistened, later appreciating how they looked like almost dry drops of blood.

 

She had a choker of garnet chips, bought in Bohemia, fixed on a red velvet ribbon, that had looked like that moment when a throat pulsed out it's last on her skin. Perhaps it would be a more appropriate symbol for the Queen of Blood.

 

She could not wait too long, the hunger had to be peaked but it could not overwhelm them. She needed to be able to corral them, even if she wanted them hard to control, and the last thing she wanted was the weather breaking, the sun would destroy them, making them as weak as mere humans, even strengthened by the blood Hale would tear through them like tissue paper. They were cannon fodder in the eternal war between the two of them, but she didn't want them to give it up too easily.

 

The local high school was having a parade the next day, she noticed, the news anchor was hoping they'd have fine weather and for a whole moment she considered it, but they were children, no older than she was when she had been turned. They had their entire lives ahead of them, a life of boys and girls, whichever they preferred, of the monotonous drudgery of human adulthood. If they were the subject of her slaughter they would be saved that, but they still believed in dreams.

 

There was a tragedy in that too.

 

She had been little more than a child, by modern standards, old and brittle and broken but physically young, when she was turned.

 

Maybe if she took one, if she turned it, some child, maybe they'd be the next Queen of Blood.

 

She laughed at her own dark joke. There could never be another Queen of Blood. Modern children were spoiled useless things, and there were enough vampires exactly like that already.

 

Dawn was coming, she could feel it in her bones, the creeping lethargy. She was old and she was powerful, and still she felt the sun rising. The new bits were groaning, not recognising the new heaviness, it would not impede them, not out of the direct sunlight, but they’d always feel it.

 

Sebastian had been ancient, slipping his human form over a hundred years ago to become something other, something magnificent and strange and finding a place that suited him, but even in those last days of his transformation, when he had been as close to a god as a being could be, just as he became a god, he had felt the rising of the sun.

 

She wondered what she would become when she entered the change, would she be like Pearl, shackled to her own effluvia, or like Oftred in Helsinki, vast and draconic, trapped under the city by an avalanche, scales sliding against each other, hungry for stories but unable to understand the new form of the language those who worshipped him spoke.

 

There were ten such gods scattered across the world, and Sebastian was the youngest despite being over two thousand years old. In comparison, she was just a youngling.

 

The sun's lassitude was like the ease after orgasm.

 

The weather looked to hold, overcast and pregnant with rain, the air thick and musky with early summer heat. “Ready the troops," she told the vampire next to her as she uncoiled herself from her throne, “we strike on the hour.”

 

—-

 

Hale paced back and forth like a caged tiger, “we know she's here," he told the _Schattenjaeger_ , Peter Hale, “she is behind that train massacre.”

 

Everyone on board the train was dead, Hale knew, except one little girl, found sat on a vinyl bench, her clothes splattered with blood. She had her eyes closed and her hands over her ears. She had told the first responders the lady had told her to do it.

 

It was exactly the way Lightborn worked, she would commit massacres and leave the one person that would have the most impact left behind. Killing the girl would have been another statistic, leaving her alive created a reaction.

 

Hale was angry, so angry and feeling so betrayed he could almost taste blood at the back of his throat.

 

And the _Schattenjaeger_ seemed so calm. He had come to this city because the _Schattenjaeger_ was present, and he was doing nothing.

 

That was not quite true, he was flirting with Allison in a half-hearted kind of way, and exchanging sarcastic barbs with the kitsune he kept in his service.

 

She was a lovely thing, with no more than three tails, because sometimes when he saw her from the corner of his eye he could see them writhing around her like threats. She favoured catsuits of various fabrics, always open to show the gap between her breasts, or held shut with flimsy looking ribbons and vinyl boots that went over her knees that were completely inappropriate for someone who worked in what looked like a bookstore.

 

There were wards and things to keep people from accidentally wandering in but Hale was old enough to know what it is - the wandering tower, the seat of the _Schattenjaegers_ where they kept their most powerful and dangerous magics, because although the man who owned the bookshop looked harmless, stretched out on a couch in a pair of jeans and a cashmere v neck sweater, he was very much anything but.

 

He was the _Schattenjaeger_ , and where Hale had believed they were an order of sorcerers they were a single human, a power that was inherited with knowledge, and guarding his back was a kitsune, a being powerful enough in its own right.

 

Hale was half an aeon old and apart from the two humans he had brought with him he was the weakest thing in the room and he knew it.

 

And the _Schattenjaeger_ said wait, so they waited.

  


—-

 

The vampires seethed from the shadows like a tide, tearing into anyone who was there, the blood hot and bright as she watched. They were young, wild and free in their hunger, not sure what else to do but feed, and they glutted.

 

It was an orgy of violence, cars crashing in the attempt to escape the tide, but the vampires just jumped on the hoods to tear the commuters out through the windshields and tear into them with teeth.

 

There was a delicious wildness to it.

 

She still had the song stuck in her head, “She’s a killer queen, gunpowder gelatine, dynamite with a laser beam, guaranteed to blow your mind.”

 

She had chosen her battlefield so carefully, now all she had to do was wait.

 

—-

 

It took certainly no longer than an hour for him to appear, human puppies in tow, tearing through the new bits like paper, glorious in his almost beast form. Perhaps when the older vampires charged him he would change completely but right then he was almost human. His shoulders were broader, the shirt barely lasting the first encounter, and the ridge of his white streak, the terrible reminder of his inhumanity, thickened to form a ridge down his spine that would become the thickest part of his fur.

 

He was beautiful like that.

 

In his humanity- Stiles loved him, in his inhumanity- Lightborn loved him. Yet they both loved different things in him. Lightborn loved him for what he could be, and Stiles loved him for who he had been.

 

—-

 

The vampires emerged from the sewers and doorways like rats, climbing over each other like the moment when a dam burst and the water surged out, thick with mud and branches and whatever else it carried. They were new bits, Szeraf guessed, for they grabbed anything they could to bite, where although the older ones lacked their ferocity they were more vicious and deliberate in their attacks.

 

If the new bits were rats clambering over each other to get to the people who were screaming and running from the streets the older ones were the ones who blocked their escapes.

 

And in the heart of it, sat on an overturned car with her legs crossed demurely, despite her nakedness and her inhumanity, was Lightborn.

 

—-

 

The rain started, thick pelting slaps of warm water, and she tilted her head up to let it stream down her face, wetting her hair and rolling in rivulets between her breasts and into the folds of her armpits.

 

It felt glorious and new.

 

Then the woman in black appeared, dropping from the sky like a bullet, and even Lightborn raised an eyebrow as she pulled a sword from her own sternum and began to fight, a proper _kendoka_ in this day age. She had, of course, anticipated the possibility but seeing the _Schattenjaeger’s_ pet _sanbi kitsune_ with thunder instead of bones would always be a pleasure.

 

She fought like the samurai in an old black and white film and it had been so long since Lightborn had been in Japan that she was struck with a sense of homesickness, brief and easily shunted aside. Where else would minor goddesses jump from windows in what looked like a vinyl catsuit and pull a sword from their sternum than Japan? Maybe that was why she missed it in that moment.

 

—-

 

“Kira,” Peter said, with his hand, “you know what he is, don't you?” he gestured to Hale who was rolling his shoulders in preparation for the fight that was coming.

 

“He's the disruptor, the clave, the pebble in the pond,” Kira answered although her answers were rote, “what do you think we should do?”

 

“If I fall another _Schattenjaeger_ would rise, we are eternal even if, well I'd like you to watch my back, I wanna get out of this alive, I’m not stupid or self-sacrificing,”

 

Kira shrugged a “true enough” as he talked.

 

“But I’m replaceable, he’s not, if it looks like he's going to fall, you protect him not me. If I fall the next _Schattenjaeger_ will come and find you- if he falls the seal breaks.”

 

“And we don't want that," she said.

 

“Too bloody right we don't, the seal breaks and the demon will rise and no one has time for that. Lightborn is a taunt, a big fuck you to him, making him pay attention to her, she’s inconsequential in our war, this is about protecting him. The seal must hold.”

 

She nodded her lovely head, “the seal must hold," she repeated.

 

—-

 

Then as the tide flickered back and forth, numbers pressing the merry band back, the S _chattenjaeger_ using his dreadful bauble, his pocket sun, to weaken those that they fought something unexpected happened.

 

The human puppy, the girl, the one whose name Lightborn hadn't bothered to learn because she wasn't Hale's type and so there was no threat there, pulled out a hatchet, a functional heavy home depot thing, and cut Hale's head clean away.

 

And then all Hell broke loose - literally.

 

—-

 

There was a moment of light, a great shining beam that erupted from the stump of Hale's neck.

 

It lasted a moment, but was long enough to sear the image on the eyes of those who saw it and Peter Hale reacted as a _Schattenjaeger_ , first with a curse, second with a leap he’d be feeling in his knees the next day, if they had one, and caught the body as it fell.

 

"Kira!” he shouted, “ _kekkai_ _!_ ” Kira turned, met his eyes and cut her way through the vampires to him. She took her sword, a katana and slammed it into the ground beside him with a short chant and the golden light formed a dome protecting him.

 

—-

 

Allison had no idea what had happened. She knew what the Van Helsing’s taught her, if you wanted to kill a powerful vampire you took out it's sire. Hale was Lightborn's sire, so why was everyone acting like she had ended the world. Lightborn was the enemy here, and if killing Hale got rid of Lightborn then Allison had done the right thing.

 

—-

 

The vampires turned when the light faded. They gathered around the spilling pool of blood making a strange hum, and Lightborn felt it in her bones with the empty chasm of grief and rage, a human child, one of Hale's own puppies had turned on him, and she had hurt him, but the blood was pooling and congealing as the _Schattenjaeger_ dragged the body into the dome of light that the kitsune had constructed around the katana she had driven into the concrete. She had pulled her other two tails from her body, one shoved into the top of her ridiculous white heeled boots, and the other, a metal fan, she was slaughtering with. If the vampires came near her she cut them down.

 

And it didn't matter. They just rose again.

 

The hum rose to a crescendo and the vampires as one rose their heads to the sky and started to scream, the noise like a crystalline shimmer that ached in Lightborn's bones but she was not so young, her lore so weak, that she was not overcome by the itch in her skin that made her want to scream with them.

 

And from the blood, wearing it like a robe with thick branches that lashed around his bare feet, was a man.

 

He was sandy-haired with a strong aquiline nose and although his eyes were deep set they were a brilliant blue. He was handsome, but his smile was cruel.

 

The lines of his lore burned it's way through his skin, not just the thick stripes like Lightborn and Hale had but like his entire network of veins and arteries were painted on his skin and he raised his throat to scream and even the dead vampires clamoured to scream with him.

 

Whoever this man was, whoever had risen from the blood of her beloved. He had stolen her army.

 

The man, the new one, who was a vampire old and powerful, but one she did not know, spoke out and his voice was eloquent and firm, “destroy them all.”

 

“Hey," Lightborn called, “you get more flies with honey, so you don't bark orders, and you don't bark orders to my vampires, I don't give up my army to imposters in dresses.”

 

“You were the mate," the man said, cocking his head, “of the one who bound me.” He put his hand around her throat, in a threat and pulled her in close. He took a deep breath through his nose along her ear before he reached out with his tongue and look a long taste.

 

“Hale? When did he," he cut her off with the hand around her throat slowly tightening.

 

When he spoke it was clearly and crisply, like a Bond villain. “I am Deucalion, I am the inevitable retribution, the destroyer of worlds and the wellspring of lore, and I have no use for you.”

 

“Well I’m not pleased to meet you either, but...”

 

He cut her off again as the lore within her burned like white light and she fell backwards, thrown across the area and crashing through a medium sized car.

 

She pulled herself out with a groan, it had been a long time since anything had made her feel powerless, even in the smallest part. He had grown out of the blood the little Van Helsing bitch had spilled from Hale, and if she couldn't join him, she’d tear him apart, burn down his house and salt his lands.

 

Hale had defeated this fucker and she wasn't going to let him have any achievements she didn’t.

 

Because he wasn't dead, it didn't matter if the Van Helsing bitch cut off his head - he wasn't dead because she wouldn't let him be.


	13. Deathbeds

 

 _That little kiss you stole_  
 _It held my heart and soul_  
 _And like a deer in the_ headlights _I meet my fate_  
 _Bring me the horizon - Deathbeds_

\---

 

There were beds of sweet william in front of the manor, the warm sunlight glinting off the tiny panes of glass on the windows, overhung by thick warm stone, the white mortar broken up by black beams stained black. The air smelt sweet and heavy with roses that he could not see.

Under his feet the gravel crunched and he could hear birdsong in the trees about the manner, which stirred in a light, sweet summer wind, and he felt light in a way that he had not in a very long time.

He was home.

Hale manor had been burned after the slaughter, had it always been covered in ivy on the north wall? And was there always a branch of rowan wood over the main door? He wasn't sure if he was remembering it wrong or it had appeared wrong, but it was home.

He had been born in this house; had brought Stiles to this house; had felt the loss of it like a dagger in his soul when he'd had to burn it to the ground.

It had been in this house where he had destroyed himself.

Why was he seeing it now, he wondered. It had burned nearly five hundred years before.

The slate floor felt cold under his feet, he was stood there in just his jeans, his feet and chest bare and his hair short, but the house felt warm and inviting. He half expected his sister to walk down the stairs; her skirts tangling in her legs, and her hair neatly bound back, a book in her hands.

The stairs were oak but his grandparents had had it painted to look like stone, but years of use had meant that the paint had been torn away in strips to reveal the wood underneath, and the light fell in diamonds on the floor and up the stairs.

There was a bundle of lavender tied with green riband in a clay pot on a table by the door, so the first thing a person smelled on entering was clean and sweet. There were beeswax candles beside it but they were unlit, leaving the entry way cool and dark.

Inside he could hear the laughter of children. He did not remember how long it had been since this house was full of laughter.

The fire was lit in the main room, the tapestries his mother had made hanging on the west wall, away from the sunlight, and there were a few chairs but mostly the children were sat on a large rug on the floor, in the heart of them was Stiles.

It was Stiles as she had never been in life, with her hair bound up in a French hood and the necklace he had given her around her neck. She wore a sober black dress with a soft trim of tiny pink roses against the bound swell of her breasts, and her skirt was gold with green stripes under the mantua. There was a baby held in the pool of her skirts, face sticky with drool and fat hands trying to grab at her face as she cooed at him.

When she saw Derek she smiled.

There were three children, one girl with black hair, half fallen from her braid but caught in a little hood, with the same triangle of moles beside her ear that drove Derek wild, and Stiles’ soft smear of a mouth, the colour like smoked salmon, but she had grey green eyes, and there was a boy, still toddler fat but with the same golden eyes as Stiles, with the same dark hair as his sister. The baby, as well, had Stiles large golden eyes, but his hair was blonde, the colour that would darken as he grew older.

When Derek saw the four of them stepped backwards, tripping over the rug, and colliding into a table hard enough that he cried out with pain.

“This isn't real,” he mumbled, “this isn't.”

"No,” the schattenjaeger said, he was wearing a black knit v neck that was open almost to his navel, and jeans with combat boots, “not quite.”

"Is this a spell?” Hale asked him.

“Not quite," he answered, he was drinking a can of Dr Pepper.

“Hell? Am I supposed to kill them over and over, this is not what happened.”

“How the fuck should I know?” The Schattenjaeger said, “this isn't my fantasy.”

“This isn't what I wanted for him,” Derek protested, watching as Stiles bussed kisses on the baby in her arms, correcting her daughter’s recitation of a poem, as the boy played with a wooden ball tied to a cup.

“Could this be what she wants for you?”

"I just wanted," he sighed, "It doesn't matter, now, what is this?”

“The Van Helsing girl cut off your head,” the schattenjaeger said, “this is what came next.”

“I hardly imagine you’d be invited to my personal afterlife,” Hale said.

“You're not dead," the schattenjaeger said. There was no room for argument in his tone.

“She cut off my head," Derek protested, watching Stiles play with their children with real hunger. Had he wanted this, he wondered, a simple life with a happy bride and fat healthy children in the house his family had lived in?

“You’re a vampire that’s half an eon old, you know it's not that simple, if cutting your head off would work someone would have done it years ago, some opportunistic little bottom feeder trying to save himself from you. You're the pebble in the pond, the demon seal, the great disruptor, do you really think that cutting your head off will kill you?”

“Then what is this?” Derek roared, the baby in Stiles’ arms started to cry, startling at the noise.

“The Demon is loose, and whilst your head is not on your shoulders he remains loose, so this is him trying to stop you putting him back behind bars, whilst you stay here, in this Heaven he's created for you, he's out doing his thing.” The Schattenjaeger was the perfect image of louche sexuality, sprawled against the table as if he was powerless and the only thing he had to offer was his sex.

He was the Schattenjaeger, the last line of defence against things so powerful and terrible that Hale did not want to even consider their existence, and he was the Lord of the Tower of Mystery, where the great powers of the world were locked away in a place that existed in many places at once. Hale had heard so many tales of the Schattenjaeger until he first met one he had thought that it was an order, not a single knight.

And here he stood, looking so weak and powerless, and sad, as if he knew how awful and how painful this scene would be to Derek, but there was nothing he could do about it, except talk and he wasn't sure that his words would ever be enough.

“Why should I leave?” Derek asked, everything looked so calm and peaceful, “why should I go back to the fighting, haven't I done enough?”

The Schattenjaeger gave a small gallic shrug a barely there roll of the shoulders. “I can't make you," he said. “But if you stay here Lightborn will die in the real world.”

Derek flinched like he had been struck.

“If I die," the schattenjaeger said calmly, “there’ll be another one, oh we’ll probably lose the city, and my replacement might be able to stop him, whilst people exist new schattenjaegers will rise to fight him, but everyone in the city will die, including Lightborn.”

“How can I stop it?” Derek asked.

“Rise," the schattenjaeger said, he put his empty can on the wooden table amidst the pewter. “You are the demon seal, stick him back in the hole, whilst you live he’s powerless, so live.”

—-

Lightborn dropped next to the barrier that protected the schattenjaeger and Derek's body, she landed heavily, on one fist and knee, with her other knee bent in what she had heard called a superhero landing. She rose backhanding the human girl into the barrier and in a single motion tore into the vampires surging forward.

“Not really dressed for battle, Fox,” she grinned through a blood smeared mouth, lips black and skin grey. Her lore skated across her flesh like the hand of a lover. “Unless you prefer to fight the great unwashed in your lingerie.”

The kitsune looked her up and down, “well, you're one to talk.” Lightborn was naked but for swathes of blood that wrapped around her like currents. She lashed out with them, using them like spears, but there was nothing revealing in her nudity, she was too inhuman for that.

Floating above the fight the hawkish looking vampire was doing the same thing, but where the spikes of his blood reanimated the vampires that the kitsune and her group cut down, Lightborn's ripped them in two. “A body like mine," Lightborn grinned, her mouth stained with blood, “is far too good to cover up.”

“Still look like you escaped from a Marilyn Manson video," Allison snarled.

A spike of blood came crashing down next to Allison, almost close enough to kill her, “whoops,” Lightborn said as a sniper shot blew open the head of a vampire near her.

“This is your fault,” Allison screamed.

"No," Kira said, not losing a beat in her fighting, “this is yours.”

—-

Derek walked over to where Stiles sat on the floor with his family, "I love you," Derek said, kissing her forehead, "I love you so much, and I am so sorry," he enfolded the three of them in his arms, "I am so so sorry.”

Then with his heart breaking he stood up and turned away from him. “Schattenjaeger, you never told me why we share a name, when we get back, when this is over, will you tell me?”

The schattenjaeger nodded, "I have records, I can show you, but you had a brother, we're related in a way, distantly, but yeah, I’m the same sort of Hale as you. I’ll show you the family tree when we get back."

Derek was chewing his lip, before he looked over his shoulder at Stiles, she seemed blithely unaware of his presence, “I’m so very fucking sorry," he said and changed, his mouth splitting open and Stiles smile faltered before she started to scream.

The blood landed on the freshly plastered wall with a slap and it surprised Derek that he could hear it over the whimpering of the baby before he closed his hand over it.

When it was done, when he was covered in blood, “this will stop the demon?” he asked the schattenjaeger. “Will it hurt him?”

The schattenjaeger nodded, “we’re going to make the fucker suffer.”

—-

Lightborn backhanded Allison to get her to stay down, knocking her to the floor and coming close to breaking her jaw, “and fucking stay down.” It was because she had turned to deliver this message that she saw it, the way the stump of Derek's neck began to glow.

The Schattenjaeger opened his eyes and began to stretch himself out where he was cross legged as he muttered about being too old for this shit.

It was like something from a Renaissance painting the way that Hale rose, he lifted from the shoulders so they hovered above the ground and his head rolled towards him, and strings of some sort of sinewy red glop formed between them pulling his head back unto his shoulders but still he rose, his clothes tearing from him, and then when he had reached full height, with the slash of his throat the only thing unhealed he came to standing floating above the area, by about a head’s height, and the blood and lore he called to him from the vampires in front of him became a great swathe of fabric that he brought down in front of him like spikes, and the more vampires he killed with it the greater it became, and the blood from those vampires he hadn't skewered started to vomit towards him.

There were no other words.

Lightborn was filled with glee, her arms and mouth covered in gore that stained her bare breasts, “look at you," she said in a tone of awe and pride, and then she lifted herself up, twisting herself like she was made of fabric, into his embrace. “Look at you," she repeated.

“Deucalion," The schattenjaeger shouted, “not this time.”

The other vampire, the old one, Deucalion turned to look at him. “You can't kill me, Shadow-walker," the vampire said, “you are just a petty bloodling, a sack of food for my children.”

“They aren’t your children any more," Hale said and the vampires in front of him, the army Lightborn had created to gain Hale's attention, started to fall, row by row like their strings had been cut, the blood he had pulled from them swirling around him like a tattered piece of fabric and the scars of his lore, a darker red than those Lightborn wore, blazed like a light had been placed underneath them.

He looked like a god, framed like a Botticelli painting and Lightborn was in awe. This was the Hale she had always wanted, powerful and aware of his power, prepared to use it to get what he wanted, to be what he was - a god.

He moved like he was underwater as he met Deucalion, not with a blow as Lightborn expected, but a kiss.

When he pulled back his mouth was wet with blood and Deucalion fell to the earth, “I cannot kill you, and I will not give you the luxury of being sealed away, not after what you did,” Lightborn had never heard him sound so vicious or cruel. “I can't get back what you did to me, so I’ll give you a cruelty of my own, a mortal body. Just like the curse, I am your seal, whilst I live, whilst I exist, you shall have no power, no influence, no Lore. I will hold it for you, I will keep all that you are inside me, so you can dream and aspire and live, live for a hundred thousand years, and know that you are powerless, and you will never get her back.”

Deucalion, when Hale let him go, fell to the floor and spat at him, but the gobbet didn’t reach him and fell to the floor. “You didn't have to be cruel," Hale said, “and I will remember that cruelty, and I shall repay it in kind.”

“Shadow-walker," Deucalion called out, “is this your doing?”

“I’m not the sort to get my hands dirty," the Schattenjaeger said stuffing his hands in the pockets of his jeans, “you should know that.”

Deucalion began to curse, long strings of invections in languages Lightborn didn't speak. She moved across and kicked him hard across the face, “you have to push my darling to cruelty,” she said and turn so her face was just above his, her hand cupping the demon's jaw, “but I’m not so altruistic," with that she dragged her tongue the length of his throat. “This is so much crueller than anything I could devise, but come near me or my again and I will discover if you heal, or if I wound you will you walk around with your liver hanging out for eternity.”

“Little blood bitch," Deucalion hissed and it was enough for Lightborn, she slammed her forehead into the bridge of his nose.

“Keep talking," she said, “I can do this all day.”

“Lightborn," Hale said, and it was to her knowledge the first time that he had used the name that she had given herself, “Come," he held his hand out to her and she grinned, her face splitting open with all of it's vampire teeth, sharp like needles, on display. She took his hand on his own and let the blood swathe circle around them.


	14. So Far from your weapon

_I try to give you whiskey_  
 _But it never does work_  
 _Suddenly, you're begging me_  
 _To do so much worse_  
 **The Dead Weather** \- _So Far from your weapon_

The summer in New Mexcio had covered everything in a dusty golden haze, like a filter on a lens. Stiles sat on the desk in the motel room that they had made their own. Hale had bought the motel from the owners, choosing it for it's remoteness and apparent lack of trade. Most of the rooms had been locked up and the owners were keen to go, the legals being taken care of years later, although Stiles had said in the car, “we should just eat them.”

“No killing,” Hale repeated for what felt like the thousandth time “and we have more than enough money.”

The highway had pretty much killed the trade, a few bikers might have taken the detour that brought them past the place but Hale laid the cheque down on the counter, more than the place was worth, and flicked the light to read No Vacancies and the next day the contract was signed, and the day after that he started to call the bitten to him. The rooms filled up quickly, then they brought tents, garden sheds, anything they could that would give them some shelter although they didn’t need it, with Hale giving over the living quarters that the old couple had kept for themselves to people, taking a room the second floor for himself and Stiles.

One room was left open for bathroom facilities but it looked like they might need more, for vamps didn't need to shit or piss unless they were eating human food, but they enjoyed showers and baths, and the desert dust was pernicious, riming their skin like grit.

By the end of the first week there was a sea of canvas and line empty space behind the motel, RVs and people camping in their cars, coming because he called them.

Stiles was painting her toenails. She had just showered and her skin was still damp, a pair of daisy duke’s tugged on and struggled with against wet skin, and a torn old white tee with the sleeves ripped off and the body tied in a knot so she could show off her navel and where she had cut off the waistband of the denim. She didn't blow dry her hair, scarlet now, just brushed it back from her forehead.

She looked like the worst of trailer trash except for how her skin was grey, like marble, and her eyes black with red irises, her mouth full of teeth but she didn't part the skin of her cheeks.

She was beautiful to him.

Pulling the brush, coated with scarlet polish, over her nails, and then raising her head to look at him like she couldn't believe he would watch her do something so very banal with such a look of absolute wonder, there would be a snort of laughter, before she started again, adding another coat until her nails were letterbox red.

There was music playing on the radio, with an obnoxious DJ trying to drum up attention and people to call in but other than white noise Hale couldn't say he was giving it much attention, but Stiles was humming along as she worked, sometimes singing a snatch of lyrics but mostly humming.

He didn't really remember her liking music much before.

Oh he had hummed along with the radio, he had even broken out with some Tom Petty in the car as Szeraf drove through the flat plains of America, the happy blandness of the music Lydia had used when she was concocting, the others, the songs that evoked Scott, dancing around the millhouse in the weeks before his death. Humanity was twined into music like a pair of socks, strange how even someone who did not care for it would associate songs with someone so strongly.

“I love this song,” Stiles said, a bloody flush blooming under the grey marble of her tee, a quick flash of the vampire underneath the woman, as the strong piano was matched by a man's vocals, a song that Hale did not recognise as she started to dance, the soft vocals becoming staccato before the band joined the piano as the man sang “I’m a shooting star leaping through the sky like a tiger, defying the laws of gravity.”

Hale couldn't help but laugh, it was almost ludicrous, watching one of the most dangerous creatures in the world singing “I wanna make a supersonic man out of you” as she ran her fingers over her man's wife beater and daisy duke shorts, bouncing on her feet and as she cast her hair back it became a million blood red whips down her back, falling out of it’s shortcut into a great mane twisted with curls.

She was laughing, enjoying the music and the company not quite doing a striptease, pulling the fabric tight over her stomach, and rolling her head, moving and leaning forward so that he could feel her breath on his face, he could smell the blood on her lips, curling into the spaces between her teeth and the sweetness of cinammon gum that had been flashing between her teeth that morning, after she had climbed from his bed, her arms stretched above her head, making her small little tits standing proud on her chest and her stomach cave in a little as she yawned.

He had reached forward then, cupping his large hand around her small waist and pulled her back down to his embrace and they had lost each other for hours in flesh and touch and taste, and then she had swung her legs over the edge of the bed and from the pocket of her jacket, hung over the back of the chair, she had taken the cinnamon gum, folding the stick up before she slipped it in to her mouth, biting down.

Hale had showered and brushed his teeth but she didn't bother with those things, just tugged on her daisy dukes, and his wife beater that was just too big, stretched out over her tits, and a hand through her hair and she declared herself done.

She had lost so many of the human niceties over the years. It made him wonder why he clung to them so fiercely.

He pulled her in for a kiss, hands on her small bony ass, so that she sat on his knee, thighs either side of his own, and her hands, cold as they were, running up the sleeves of his shirt like they would continue their lovemaking from this morning as the man sang his frenetic song behind them.

“Sorry to interrupt," the young man said opening the door, he didn't look sorry, he was a vampire of perhaps a hundred years, old enough to serve as lieutenant in Lightborn’s war, Hale thought his name was Theodore, but he wasn't sure.

He had agreed to Hale's terms so he was Hale’s man now, not a vampire whose existence was a challenge any more.

He wasn't even jealous of him the way that he had always been with Sebastian. Theodore was a grunt, Sebastian was a master. Sebastian shaped her, Theodore did what he was told. He was handsome enough, barely old enough to have survived past the hunger, grey eyes and wide cheekbones, and a body that looked like it had been carved from golden marble. He might not have come into his first transformation yet.

He did not appear sorry to interrupt at all, everything about him suggested smugness. It might simply have been his nature.

His quick grey eyes took note of Hale’s fingers, down under the denim waistband of the cut off jeans and he licked his lips but there was no other sign of interest in him, even when Lightborn turned to look at him. “You've never been sorry for anything," she said.

Theodore shrugged, it was true enough. “There’s a human outside, he says he has something you want to see.” Everything about Theodore suggested there was a time he would have feasted on the human and taken what he had and not for a moment regretted it, but he regretted whatever it was that prevented him from doing it, and he couldn’t. Hale had made sure of that, using the power he had taken from Deucalion to ensure it.

Lightborn sighed, “humans,” she said like they were a species that she could not understand and would never even try to.

Lightborn gloried in their inhumanity, where Hale clung to what remained of his.

 

The Texas heat was oppressive, the sun beating down on them like a hammer on an anvil, trying to shape them like metal, it made the newbits sluggish, as they struggled to resist it’s weight, so they lolled on plastic lawn furniture like lizards on rocks in the sun, watching the human led into their mist unaware of his nature as prey.

The man seemed cocky, tall and thin with glasses and a sour expression, but when he saw Lightborn he seemed surprised, perhaps he expected her in her inhuman form as the Queen of Blood instead of a young woman dressed for the oppressive heat, her hair was still long and sumptuous however.

The man fussed with his glasses and from his pocket he pulled a photograph, she took it from him and looked it, before she sighed again. “Where did you find this?” she asked.

Her good humour was gone.

“I work for the university," he said, “this was in our archive, I,”

She cut him off, “thank you for bringing this to me, now go,” her tone was like ice but he didn't seem to understand that. He seemed unaware of the danger he was in and the colder Lightborn got the more the tone changed from one of indolent ease to something dark that simmered in the ophidian predators that surrounded them. They all turned their heads to watch, giving a feeling of impending violence.

“But," he stammered.

She took a deep breath. “Theo, please take him to his car.”

Theo put his hand on the man’s shoulder to pull him away. “I thought," the man stammered, “you were,”

Lightborn spun on a bare heel and her eyes lost their golden human light, in their place was the black sclera and red iris of the beast that lurked in her skin. “I was what?”

“You were supposed to turn me," the man stammered, “I’m useful, I could be useful to you.”

Lightborn laughed at his despair and desperation, this man had believed that he deserved her attention and used the photo, Hale had not seen it, to ensure that she would meet him and had convinced himself that she would invite him into her inner circle. Hale had never really entertained the fanboys as Szeraf had called him, those people who followed her on the internet and lusted after her bite.

“You are lucky I am letting you live,” she said and reached out, her fingertips sharp as bone, “the arrogance of the white American man," the colour had run from her face leaving in its place the grey marble and red striations of her monstrous other, “you think that because you have brought me something that I owe you, and of course you needed it to be me, for I am the Queen, is that not right, human?” The man seemed both terrified and aroused as the humanity bleached from her. “And there are hundreds of photos of me, some of them I even posed for, they have no value. Theo, my dear, escort him from the property, if he returns, eat him.”

The man went to talk but she reached forward and pressed the tip of her finger to his lips. “Do not press your luck, just because I am not hungry now does not mean I will not be hungry next time,” she let her face split open showing the rows and rows of teeth inside.

The smell of fresh urine filled the air and Theo just laughed as the wet patch spread around his crotch and down his inseam.

Hale said nothing, he was the one who had put the stricture in place that they could not feed, that they should feed only on cattle, buying them and slitting their throats over bowls that they dipped their cups into, young enough that they still needed it.

Perhaps Lightborn was right, he thought, thinking of this desperate, awful man, he never had understood.

**Author's Note:**

> CONTAINS SPOILERS 
> 
> I want to make clear that Stiles in this fic is not transgender, he has extreme body dysphoria and the ability to shape shift, so he, unlike most other vampires because of the dysphoria, has the ability to change gender. When he shapeshifts he can become anything he wishes, even other people, because he has this dysphoria. He defines himself as neither male nor female because of what was done to him when he was a child.
> 
> Stiles is a character who was sexually mutilated as a child [not in fic] and then sold to a pimp who hired him out, and in doing that had him spend his formative years as both male and female, destroying his gender identity. He’s whatever they wanted him to be, and Derek accepts him as neither male nor female but Stiles. So he, in his transformation to vampire, makes the distinct shift from powerless to powerful and this is at the core of his self identity. He doesn't care when they call him the Queen of Blood because the key word in that is Queen, ie someone who no one messes with.
> 
> This does not mean all people with this sort of dysphoria will react in this manner but this is how Stiles reacts, and why he accepts the pseudonym of Lightborn, because in his mind he was reborn in light as a predator, one who is chameleonic to better allow him to hunt. He also uses their perception of his appeal to attract prey. He is whatever will get the job done because after a human lifetime of being whatever the client wanted, and then 500 years of feeding he defines himself as neither he nor she but Stiles, [he might accept the Ze/Zir pronouns if he ever learned about them, but it's not something he's ever discussed with anyone]
> 
> I would not define him as asexual but he is closer to ace on the spectrum than he is to any other, but he has his obsessive love for Derek which often spirals into sex so, after 500 years of this, it becomes hard to define whether he actually desires Derek or he knows it’s inevitable and craves the closeness.
> 
> I am not qualified to make anything other than broad sweeping statements here, Stiles is both male and female because I need him to be for the story, certain scenes need him to be female and others to be male. and I knew he was a castrati the first time I saw, in my head, the meeting between him and Derek, and Derek accepting him for who he was, mutilated and male in women's clothing.  
> Although Stiles’ pimp is shown to be abusive he is punished for what he does. 
> 
> I do a lot of meta and that means dealing with a lot of people who are virulently defensive of Scott so I made the decision to barely include him in this fic because they really bug me. So Scott-stans this is not the fic for you. It's not a I hate Scott fic - because I don't, his fans bug me but Scott and I are okay - because he is shown to be an amazing character - just only in flashback


End file.
